Maybe the only rational thing to do in this universe is to buy a bottle of whiskey and go fishing.
Medical folks are possessed of dark humor, the shorthand phrase for advising someone with a widespread and untreatable malignancy to forego fruitless chemotherapy and be comfortable in the their last days and weeks is “the 6PFP protocol” — a 6-Pack and a Fishing Pole. Not far from your formulation at all.
How many other Nidal Hassans are shuffling toward Texas to be born?
Off-base Texas is a terrible place to try that kind of thing. Texans are rather well-armed and have no compunction with engaging mass public shooters. The Fort Hood shooting is not even the worst MPS in the history of Killeen, TX, there was a shooting at a Luby’s in 1991 that was a seminal event in concealed-carry rights here, one of the uninjured survivors was a Killeen chiropractor, Suzana Gratia Hupp, whose parents were murdered in that shooting. She served 10 years as a state representative, she is the anti-Carolyn McCarthy.
I have been concerned about low-tech terrorism in multiple places ever since the Muhammed sniper fest in DC and the Beslan school takeover. We are not ready for distributed violence of that sort in the United States. At least tactical doctrine has shifted from contain-and-negotiate to engage-and-kill in the case of mass public shooting incidents, the only thing that is going to stop those actions short of shooter suicide is somebody else with a firearm. Unfortunately, most police forces are not prepared for the kind of sweep-and-clear hostage rescue that would be necessary if somebody tried a Beslan here, or worse, six or eight at the same time, spread across the nation. We really have three teams trained and able to do that kind of response — Delta, SEAL Team Six and the FBI’s HRT. What happens if there are eight schools with multiple shooters identically wired with C4, with 300 kids in the gym and television coverage of all eight, with each team promising to detonate if any of the others are attacked? Can we really coordinate eight assaults? Could the media be kept from covering them? Forty-eight jihadis with $100,000 in equipment could wreak unspeakable havoc on the fabric of our society.
Terrorism has so far been a major concern of the big cities. AQ wants big targets to make media headlines around the world, so the focus is apparently on major disasters in major media markets. Folks like me who live in a town of 75,000 or so aren’t as concerned with terrorism because we’re off AQ’s radar, or so it seems. The function of terrorism is to change the policy of a nation by terrorizing the citizenry, and if AQ ever figures out that there is more generalized terrorizing to be gained in Reno, Ames, Fresno and Ocala than NY, LA, SF and DC, we are likely to see better organized and better planned versions of Dr. Hasan’s outburst at many vulnerable points.
This is another problem I have with ‘Homeland Defense’ and the shunting of large amounts of preparedness and defense dollars to cities like New York and Los Angeles: all that money is wasted if terrorists don’t attack there, but do equivalent damage somewhere else. I think biologic sampling and radiation detectors are probably a good investment, and signals intelligence and data mining are invaluable given that the terrorists seem to be in late-model vans on the Information Superhighway. Coordination is difficult without rapid communications, and that’s a vulnerability. But to be honest, preparedness comes down to having enough shovels and brooms to allow easy cleanup after an event happens. By investing billions in fortress cities like NYC, you are sending a signal to AQ of where not to attack next. There is a lot of low-hanging fruit, and that one biohazard response truck my city got out of the post-9/11 flood of federal dollars doesn’t help a situation that calls for dynamic entry and clearing of buildings with armed terrorists and terrified children.
