It's not exactly common that we see two separate terrorist attacks on a single news cycle. Not since 9-11, actually, though thank God it was nothing of that scale.
Of course, we don't know if the Cybertruck explosion was a terrorist attack or not, but it was most definitely intentional, so I think it's a safe bet. There's no doubt about what happened in New Orleans.
When you have two attacks like that, one has to wonder when the next shoe will drop. I remember 9-11 and wondering what was next. Plane after plane hitting key buildings, one crashing in Pennsylvania, and absolutely no reason to believe it was over.
These two incidents don't seem to be particularly coordinated and are likely not linked directly, but they still happened, and there are some aspects we need to talk about.
First, we can clearly see that guns aren't needed to commit acts of mayhem.
What happened on Bourbon Street--an area Louisiana Democrats tried to turn into a gun-free zone--didn't require a firearm, just a rented truck and someone with no respect for human life. Now, 10 people are dead and 30 others are injured.
In Las Vegas, an unknown person loaded a Tesla Cybertruck down with gasoline and fireworks, drove it to the front of Trump Las Vegas, and detonated it. Both vehicles were rented via Turo, a vehicle rental service, though that might well be coincidence. It could also link them together. Right now, we don't know.
Yet neither incident--thankfully, the only life lost in Las Vegas was the driver, though several others were injured in the explosion--required a firearm to cause problems.
This is what we mean when we point out that guns aren't required for evil people to do evil things.
What I wonder, though, is just what would have happened if a good guy with a gun had been handy, particularly on Bourbon Street.
Realistically, most people hitting that part of New Orleans aren't going to be carrying. They're there to pray, and we all know that alcohol and guns don't mix. Most of us, myself included, leave the guns at home if I'm going to partake of an adult beverage.
But what if?
What if one good guy out there opted not to partake while out and about in the Big Easy? What if someone had been able to stop the attack before it got started?
How many lives might have been saved?
This is terrorism, people. This isn't something you're going to reason away. This isn't something we're going to stop with volunteers reaching out to talk people down. Violence interruption might well work for more pedestrian kinds of violent crime, but it won't stop ISIS supporters from trying to slaughter innocent people.
A bullet through the brain will.
Look, we're not supposed to say this, but some people really do just need killing. Some people need to be shot because they're nothing but rabid dogs. Those are people like terrorists who want nothing more than to hurt and kill people because their ideology--in this case, their religion, but it's not limited to that--tells them that murdering innocent people in service to their cause is a good thing.
They're not afraid of dying, in most cases. This guy figured he was going to get his 72 virgins. I say we arrange the meeting so he can find out just how wrong he is.
Las Vegas might be different, in part because I don't know how you identify a car bomber who is just sitting there for a few seconds, but if attacks like this happen more often, we'll learn and be able to act.
But it doesn't happen with a disarmed society. We need the right to keep and bear arms to protect ourselves from terrorism. This is the epitome of the kind of thing our Founding Fathers wanted to protect against. This is why we need guns and we need a lot of them throughout our society.
Admiral Yamamoto might never have really said anything about a rifle being behind every blade of grass, but it wasn't wrong at the time even if he didn't utter it. We can educate your garden-variety jihadist that little has changed and educate them the hard way.
