Nice Attack Exposes Gun Control Folly

It’s not about the guns. It was never about the guns.

On Oct. 23, 1983, Islamic terrorists crashed and detonated two trucks packed with explosives into U.S. and French military barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Americans and 58 French. Their weapon: thermobaric bombs made with PETN and compressed butane.

Feb. 26, 1993: Terrorists with al-Qadea parked a bomb-laden Ryder truck in a parking garage under the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The blast killed six and injured 1,042. Experts estimated if the truck had been parked closer to the WTC’s concrete foundations, it would have been successful at bringing down the North Tower — possibly both.

Donald Trump’s maligned talk about screening Muslim immigrants isn’t xenophobia — it’s realism.

The bomb was made with urea, nitric acid, and canisters of hydrogen. Ringleader Ramzi Yousef simply ordered the chemicals by phone before assembling the bomb.

And yesterday, when a Franco-Tunisian man named Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel decided to kill as many people as he could, he didn’t even bother with a bomb — he simply drove a cargo truck onto a seaside boulevard packed with spectators enjoying a Bastille Day fireworks celebration. Screaming “Allahu ackbar!” as he swerved left and right to hit as many as possible, Bouhel plowed more than a mile through the crowd, killing 84 and injuring more than 200 before finally being killed by police. It was the third recent major terror attack in France, following attacks in and around Paris that killed 147 last year.

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All told, these attacks took hundreds of lives, using trucks and chemicals available to almost anyone.

It’s not about the guns. It was never about the guns.

Other terror attacks have, of course, used firearms: the aforementioned terror attacks in Paris last year; mass shootings in San Bernardino and Orlando. But these are the exceptions — coordinated terror attacks have most often employed vehicles and/or homegrown explosives.

But trucks and bombs are not the problem, either. The common denominator in all of these attacks was radical Islam. On 9/11, 2,996 people lost their lives to terrorists armed with boxcutters and fake bomb vests. No guns. All it required was the willingness to kill, by any means available, coupled with the promise of Allah’s blessings for every life lost.

[lz_table title=”Death Toll from Islamic Terror on Western Soil 2001-2016″ source=”CNN,AP”]
Belgium, > 35 dead
France, > 157 dead
Spain, > 190 dead
United Kingdom, > 56 dead
United States, > 3000 dead
[/lz_table]

And we still haven’t learned that lesson. President Obama, the rest of the Democratic Party, along with the American Left in general are unbelievably reluctant to talk about bad ideology and bad people. Why? Is it the uncertainty and blurry lines of moral relativism? The childish contention that no one has the right to judge others?

Obama has never been shy about blaming death on guns, and he never misses an opportunity to loftily remind the U.S. he considers us an embarrassing, immature backwater in terms of gun control. No matter how tasteless or inappropriate the reminder is, either — he didn’t mind talking about gun control after police officers were murdered in Dallas; he didn’t worry about upsetting anyone after the shootings in San Bernardino or Orlando. We’ve got to get serious about the guns, he says.

In 2008, Obama sneered at middle-class America for, as he said, bitterly clinging to their guns, religion, and xenophobia as a more enlightened world passes them by. But he’s so very, very wrong. The right to self-protection isn’t a misguided anachronism, a relic of a world that no longer exists: It’s more critical than ever. Donald Trump’s maligned talk about screening Muslim immigrants isn’t xenophobia — it’s realism. Last month alone there were nearly 250 Islamic terror attacks worldwide.

Yet in the U.S., we persist in our foolish responses to terrorism: We strip away everyone’s freedoms to avoid offending a few. We don’t dare scrutinize travelers for Islamic radicalism — we just make everyone take off their shoes.

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We don’t listen to reports of suspicious behavior from Orlando gun shop owners, much less pay attention to our own terror watch lists; we stage congressional sit-ins and threaten to sue gun manufacturers.

The safest airline in the world is, ironically, also the one most targeted by Islamic terror: Israel’s El Al. And there’s a good reason: El Al is not afraid of profiling. They don’t rely on technology, they don’t look for weapons — they just look for terrorists. And it works.

In the West, by contrast, we continue surrendering our freedom to governments that continue demonstrating their unwillingness to get serious about terrorism.

Maybe some day we’ll look back and wonder how anyone ever bought the silly notion that disarming law-abiding people was the best way to protect them from criminals. In the meantime, though, we can only hope Obama and the rest of the American Left figure out something the rest of us have known all along:

It’s not about the guns. It was never about the guns.