Soldiers defending a French synagogue (courtesy theguardian.com)

Paris is deploying 10,000 soldiers and police to provide security within metropolitan France, and will send “thousands” of police to protect Jewish schools in the wake of attacks by Islamic terrorists that left seventeen French citizens dead last week. This is certainly a step in the right direction, given the severity of recent attacks, and the fact that the Jewish community has been repeatedly been the target of violence in the past, to the point that some recently talked about leaving their homes for safer countries . . .

Which is quite understandable. Being a minority group in a country — nay, a continent — that has repeatedly sought not merely to oppress, but to outright murder, members of that group can be a difficult burden to bear, particularly when there are more welcoming countries.

Attendees of other schools might find themselves interested in a little protection, too – when the terrorists were on the run, they did not seem to be particularly discriminating in the ethnicity or religions of the hostages they seized or the people they murdered.

Of course, France still won’t allow most of its citizens — beyond members of the security forces — to carry a firearm to allow themselves the opportunity to defend themselves. A curious position given that this Charlie Hebdo attack was hardly the first, and will certainly not be the last such attack.

The French position on gun control is even more incomprehensible when you consider that France is already awash in firearms. In The Washington Post article France has strict gun laws. Why didn’t that save Charlie Hebdo victims? Adam Taylor writes:

[T]he men who attacked Charlie Hebdo appeared to be carrying two different types of Kalashnikov rifles. Such weapons are highly restricted and require extremely stringent background checks to buy (CNN describes it as rivaling the “clearance work done by the FBI for anybody employed at the White House”).

Weapons…such as the Kalashnikov AK series, have been illegally flooding France over the past few years, with state bodies recording double digit increases.

The French black market for weapons has been inundated with eastern European war artillery and arms,” Philippe Capon, the head of UNSA police union [said]. “They are everywhere in France”.

The number of illegal guns is thought to be at least twice the number of legal guns in the country [which Taylor reports as being around 7.5 million]. Weapons such as AK-47s can be bought for the equivalent of a few thousand dollars.

For the data nerds out there – that’s around 22 million legal and illegal firearms circulating in a nation with a population of about 66 million. I’m not sure what the tipping point is when the sheer volume of any product in circulation makes it nigh-impossible to completely eliminate it from society at large, but if France isn’t already over the line, she’s darned close.

At some point, one doesn’t have to embrace the idea (as much as I’d like it) that every person has a basic right to self defense, which includes keeping and bearing some sort of armament to recognize the fact that people are going to get this anyway, and devoting police resources to tracking down 15 million “illegal” firearms, at least some of which might be held by otherwise law-abiding citizens who simply wish to keep the deck stacked in case they’re faced with the sort of atrocity as was perpetrated against the offices of Charlie Hebdo, is a waste of everyone’s time. (If the primary objective is to protect the lives of the French people, anyway.)

Despite this abject failure of gun control in France, exemplified by the fact that the Islamic terrorists that attacked Charlie Hebdo were able to acquire a “cache of arms” (as reported by the Toronto Globe and Mail), it’s still more likely that this will result in even more restrictions for our French amis, not less. Taylor notes: “After a series of deadly shootings in 2012 in Toulouse and Montauban (which also involved the use of illegally obtained weapons), the response was a call for a crackdown on gun availability.”

Pity the poor French. And keep your powder dry.

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19 COMMENTS

  1. That is a step…in the right direction. The best step is to allow all citizens to purchase appropriate arms and provide free police training for them, so they can be responsible for their own personal safety. Having employees unarmed after the communist-leftist Charlie lampoon newspaper was previously fire-bombed and the first responders show up at the scene of the Muslim terrorist massacre with no arms, is more than a little silly and useless.

    The French need to come to south Louisiana to see how we handle this in Cajun Country.

    • The problem is that most European Governments consider armed citizens more dangerous than armed terrorists…

  2. The French have enough problems with budgets already, the cost of 10,000 men over whatever they’re usually doing means this will probably last for a week or two, a few months at most. As soon as the government thinks people have started to calm down a bit, things will likely go back to normal.

    Even if they’re using their army for the bulk of the numbers, to sustain things like that will screw up training schedules and put stress on the supply system- not that they’re going to be burning up ammo in the streets of Paris, but 10,000 men who aren’t able to go back to the mess hall three times a day for food don’t eat for free.

    Not slamming the French military, either. My belief is that they have always been a pretty good bunch of guys who have been failed for centuries by poor leadership.

    Obviously, the best solution would be armed self defense by the public, but I suspect those Frenchmen who don’t want to be French have already moved to America.

  3. You really want to hitch you wagon to “French Army as goodguys with guns”? Need a historical refresher?

    And French Army “mobilizes” is jest to funn. Not even “fair” to even take the free cheap shots.

  4. I am always bewildered by the true believers in politics when confronted by the reality their cause is invective and pointless the invariable response is”We just need to do more of it. “

  6. That seems like more guns per capita than the U.S. And they are legal here. Just think how many we would have if they were outlawed!

  7. Fighting terrorism by banning self-defense firearms makes about as much sense as preventing rape by banning condoms.

  8. So the Jews of France have a couple of choices. They can depend on the French military and police to protect their children at school, or they can emigrate to Israel and depend on the IDF instead.

    I don’t know what y’all are thinking, but if it was my kids on the line, I’d go all-in on the IDF.

    • Or they can move to the US and count on the pearl-clutching educrats.

      Yeah, that IDF option is looking better and better.

  9. From the wapo article:

    “Trump, a perennial attention seeker, was likely attempting to score political points and insult liberals with his tweet. But behind the disingenuity, there is is a genuinely troubling question: Why didn’t France’s gun laws save the Charlie Hebdo victims?”

    Wow real f****** objective there. And citing a mother jones article as “credibility”. Wow… Just wow.

    When their plans fail miserably starlets take their frustrations out on their own people.

  10. I blame all of those Albanian mobsters and their Croat friends for bringing illegal AKs in for jihadis to play with. No other “Eastern European” countries have a very favorable view of Muslim extremists.

  11. that’s around 22 million legal and illegal firearms circulating in a nation with a population of about 66 million. So according to the Lord Of War, the real question is, how do we get automatic rifles in the hands of the remaining 44 million?

  12. Another example of politicians making a grand gesture to make it look like they are “doing something”…this will be very expensive for a financially strained France, led by a very unpopular President, Francoise Hollande.

  13. Wake up America, we need armed protection for our school children. How many mass shootings do we have to have in our gun free school zones before we realize our obligation to protect our children as we do adults in sport stadiums, airliners, federal buildings and other public venues?

  14. Until these days, French peoples didn’t really imagined the need for firearms.
    They somehow trust their Police enough (too much) for this as shoot out was really rare.
    When we see news about guys killed by firearms, it was always about drug dealers killing other drug dealers, and sometimes suicides.
    When holdups using firearms happened, the basis is to just let them take the shit and not risk your life because we perfectly know that the bad guy isn’t after your life.
    You may call it weak, but we were more afraid to lost our lives than to keep something that we can work to buy again.

    It never crossed our mind that it was possible for guy to enter a theater and start to shoot in the crowd. That’s how relatively “safe” we felt in our country.

    Even for me, when i walked in the street and saw a kid with an AR15 Replica, it didn’t even crossed my mind that the thing may have been real.
    In the days when my work place was attacked by some armed thiefs, we just secured ourself and left the bad guys outside, and even today, i still think that even if i was allowed to have my gun, starting a fire fight for some euro really don’t feel like a sound decision.

    But it was until these days, polititians may think otherwise but the people start to feel the need to defend themself against murderers.
    Because until today, we were perfectly aware that the everyday bad guy wasn’t after our lives.
    That’s were the biggest difference is now.

    But here come a big problem, the new generation only know firearms via Call of Duty.
    Old peoples were able to use firearms because it was a mandatory class at school (yeah i know you won’t believe me here), but right now, the genarations are too carefree, too immature for holding guns.
    In my range, it is really a pain in the ass to see youngsters trying to be instructor zero and not being able to lend a single shot in the black mark. Blaming gun, blaming the moon, blaming the flying spaghetti monster. It take us too much time to correct their immature mindset.
    Has it is, i can’t pictures armed citizen without at least a big background/medical check in place.

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