How weak are the core of your religious beliefs if you have to respond to satire with murder?

The answer to that question was exposed in Paris today, where the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo became the scene of another terror attack. This time, at least a dozen people were murdered:

Twelve people have been shot dead at the headquarters of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, say police.

Two masked gunmen are reported to have stormed the offices of the controversial publication, which has previously been attacked over its portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed.

They are believed to have been armed with Kalashnikov rifles and a rocket-propelled grenade.

According to the AFP news agency, the attackers shouted: “We have avenged the prophet.”

A manhunt is under way for the gunmen, who escaped after a shootout in the street with police.

There is no right to bear arms in the French constitution, and so the left-wing weekly was essentially undefended when the pair of attackers emerged from a small black car and opened fire with what appeared to be fully-automatic AKMs. There are also claims that the attackers may have used an rocket-propelled grenade. Blast damage to an exterior wall lends credibility to that claim.

Charlie Hebdo has been threatened by Muslims since 2011, when they ran a special issue satirizing the prophet Mohammed with cartoons.

They’ve regularly lampooned radical Islam ever since, including tweeting a cartoon today just hours before the attack which mocked the leader of the terrorist group ISIS.

Charlie Hebdo was under “police protection,” which turned out to be woefully unprepared for the attack. At least two police officers are known to be among the dead, including one wounded and then finished off with a coup de grace on video.

We’ll warn in you advance that this brief video of part of the attack is both graphic and real, and is likely not safe for work [NSFW] viewing.

Why do we post such a gruesome video? We do so to point out the fact that the terrorists were all but carefree in their attack.

They knew that once the uniformed police were killed, that the neutered citizens of Paris would be able to nothing other than cower, or at most film the attack from now ubiquitous cell phone cameras. They knew that they could complete their mission and escape before Paris police had any chance to converge upon them… and they were right.

The gunmen who attacked Charlie Hebdo got away.

Paris reels.

Sadly, if the French citizen who shot the video above had been armed, there is an excellent chance that he could have fired upon these terrorists from above, giving the injured police officer writhing on the ground at least a chance of surviving his previous wounds.

But France is, as a matter of practicality, a “gun free zone.”

There is no “right to bear arms” in the French constitution. Both semi-automatic rifles and handguns—the same firearms Americans could so easily bring to bear against terrorists in our streets outside of a handful of freedom restricted cities—are prohibited, with very narrow exceptions.

There is no practical way for French citizens to protect themselves against “enemies foreign and domestic,” a problem dramatically illustrated in German tours of Europe twice in the last century, and which is abundantly clear again today as craven followers of Allah once again terrorized civil society for failing to respect their Dark Age sensibilities.

Events occur on a daily basis around the world which show us that bad men—both in criminal gangs and criminal governments—will use the force of arms to take what they want from disarmed populations.

History has shown us time and again that if you want to be free, you must be armed to defend that freedom.

While our politics could not be further from that of the radically left-wing Charlie Hebdo, we respect their unflinching courage to face some of the most violent bullies in world history head-on with the mockery such thin-skinned cowards so richly deserved.

It’s simply too bad that—thanks to their government’s distrust of its own people—that they lacked steel in their hands to back up the steel in their spines.