The Mumbai Model

[mundaire]

This months Guns Magazine carried the following article:

The Mumbai Model
Coming soon to a theatre near you?

Only a few months after it happened in November 2008, the Mumbai Massacre is all but forgotten - at least in America. Typically, it was only a momentary flare for our media, which mainly concerned itself with high-drama close-ups of tear-stained faces and de rigueur video bites of distant smoking buildings and frightened, huddled figures. There were brief interviews with English-speaking survivors featuring such penetrating questions as, “how did you feel?” and “weren’t you terrified?” As usual, the media delivered the massage and missed the message.

The “lead-story lifespan” of the event itself hardly outlasted the 3-day incident. That’s a pity, because the Mumbai Massacre offers clear lessons for the rest of the world. Believe me — the forces of global Jihad learned plenty from it. And next time, it won’t be a re-play in Mumbai.

The Bullet: Ten young men, unremarkable and unexceptional, disembarked from small boats on the seacoast of Mumbai, India. Divided into smaller teams, groomed and dressed in Western casual clothes, they blended in well on the crowded streets. Proceeding to predetermined targets, they pulled AKs, grenades and radios out of their travel bags — and the slaughter began. Killing 173 people outright and wounding over 300 more, they brought one of the world’s largest metropolitan areas to a terrorized, screeching halt for three days — transportation, commerce, routine and even critical public services — until the last shooter was silenced.

Loss Of Faith
As often follows major earthquakes, the aftershocks continue. People can’t bring themselves to rejoin the commuting throngs. Others avoid major hotels, restaurants, and even hospitals. Many suffer shakes and nausea in crowds and stay away from anyplace people congregate. Countless citizens have no faith whatever in effective protection from the police — for good reason. They’ve seen what that faith is worth.

At local, regional and national levels, government is stressed, and repairing the physical damages to public infrastructure is the least of their worries — and the least expensive. “Business as usual” - serving the everyday needs of India’s people — gets pushed to the back burner as committees and task forces are formed, security organizations are re-structured, retrained and re-deployed, thousands of complaints and claims for damages are filed and dealt with, and inevitably, for both the right and wrong reasons, dozens of high-profile investigations and fact-finding efforts are launched.

Significant numbers of police officers and other public officials resign or are fired — some, because they realize and admit they are not psychologically equipped to deal with events like this, others because their incompetence or cowardice were spotlighted and magnified by it. The entirety of the massive Indian government will lean and its center of gravity will adjust, a few degrees or many. The full measure of effects of this single, low-budget act of terrorism defies estimation.

Sitting Ducks - And No Hunters
Mumbai - formerly known as Bombay - has a population of 13 million people; more than Los Angeles and Chicago combined. Police forces number about 40,000, numerically sufficient for that population in a fairly low-crime environment. As in US metro agencies I’ve worked with, well less than half that number are “street cops” and a tiny fraction of those, “ready-to-bump-an’-rumble” troops. Built on the British police model, the Mumbai force emphasizes a “helpful public presence” over, let’s say, skill and willingness to engage armed and violent opposition. It is an unfortunate truth few police agencies in the world are staffed, trained, and prepared to fight terrorists - especially in multiple locations, simultaneously. In this case though, a lack of training might have been well compensated for with sufficient guts.

The Anti-Terrorism Squad numbered about 35 guys - a pathetic figure. We can only guess what their level of training was for such attacks. In what may have been sheer coincidence, the unit commander was shot and killed during the initial confused response. Afterward, scads of citizens complained the police hid and huddled right alongside them, refusing, sometimes profanely, to take action against the shooters. One of those citizens was a man whose photographs were seen by billions worldwide.

From his office across the street from Chhatrapati Shivaji rail station — formerly the historic Victoria Station — photo editor Sebastian D’Souza of the Mumbai Mirror heard the first gunshots, grabbed his camera and sprinted to the scene. He saw two gunmen “calmly stroll across the station concourse shooting both civilians and policemen,” who, he said, were armed but did not return fire — they only took cover and hid.

“There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything,” D’Souza reported. “At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said Shoot them, they’re sitting ducks! but they just didn’t shoot back. What is the point,” he asked, “of having policemen with guns if they refuse to use them?”

Terror On The Cheap
All intelligence indicates the Mumbai shooters were chump-change in the treasury of terror; pawns easily recruited off shabby streets in Pakistan, with little hope and less smarts. Their training was minimal even for cannon fodder.

Various sources described them as “professional,” because the pairs alternated shooting and changing magazines; because they “shot from the hip,” and handled their weapons casually, almost playfully. The first practice is rock-bottom basic; the other two are actually sure signs of amateurs. Had they been trained soldiers, the toll could have been far higher. These guys were more like organic go-bots with guns.

They did have motivation. Lacking any expectation of ever accumulating the money to marry, and zero odds of becoming successful owners of profitable Goats ‘R’ Us franchises, they were offered promises of a deluxe trip to Paradise and a truckload of brides. They bought it.

And they had this: A virtual guarantee there would be no armed resistance from the citizens. India’s gun laws are among the strictest in the world, and its people are, practically speaking, defenseless.

D’Souza could only watch — and record the scene with photographs — as the shooters emptied their AKs into cringing knots of people and anyone who moved. As D’Souza aimed, focused and “shot” his photos of the casual, smiling young killers, the similarities between his actions in lining up his camera for a “snap” and lining up a firearm for a shot, did not escape him.

“I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera,” he mourned.

The government of India denied him that option - for his own safety, of course.

D’Souza was lucky. Those words are not his epitaph. They will not be mine. I pray they will not be yours.

For the original, check out http://www.gunsmagazine.com

[diskaon]

will we ever learn??

[warthog]

abhijeet singh can you start a political party or a pressure group.We arent going nowhere with this community.We need a movement.

[amk]

Lets face it, the vast majority of the Indian population is against RKBA. Yes they may not be educated about it but we don't have the resources to educate a billion people.

[BJL]

The fastest way to educate would be the prevalence of stories in the news media of high profile cases where terrible situations have been averted due to the presence of a legal weapon. That puts the weapons in a positive light instead of guns always accompanying criminals and terrorists. Foolish to not be armed when your enemies are.

[amk]

That will not happen as the media itself is averse to RKBA in India.

[cottage cheese]

will we ever learn??

Nope

[mundaire]

abhijeet singh can you start a political party or a pressure group.We arent going nowhere with this community.We need a movement.

http://www.indiansforguns.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5485

http://www.indiansforguns.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5613

http://www.indiansforguns.com/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=5608