We've been hearing a lot from certain people that the terrorist attacks in Paris just show how weak Barack Obama is, and we're probably going to get hit with this kind of attack here, because the terrorist are emboldened or something. In my post this morning at the Plum Line, I looked at some things noted terrorism experts John McCain and Lindsey Graham have said about the topic. In particular, I've been somewhat frustrated by the fact that there seems to be a lot of interest in the possibility of a link betwee the Paris attacks and some kind of international conspiracy, when the whole point of an attack like that is that it requires no support from anyone. Does that mean we're vulnerable to something like it? Yes, we are, but so is everyone.
But even if you believed that Obama is eroding our intelligence capabilities (and I have no idea what [Graham] talking about on that score), does that make us more vulnerable to a couple of guys with guns shooting up a public place? If such an attack were in the works, it wouldn't require getting resources from overseas, and it wouldn't require coordination and communication of the kind American intelligence might intercept. All that would be necessary is for someone who is angry enough to go to a gun show, pick up some heavy weaponry, and he'd be on his way. And he probably wouldn't have to go far-according to this calendar, there are 61 gun shows happening this week in America-not this year or this month, but just this week.
Given how easy it would be to carry out an attack like the one on Charlie Hebdo, the real question is why it doesn't happen all the time. While there have been a number of cases in recent years in which right-wing terrorists have tried to shoot a bunch of people, there have been only a couple of occurrences of politically motivated jihadist attacks like the ones in Paris-not an attempt to plant a bomb or do something similarly elaborate, but just somebody taking a gun and shooting a bunch of people-most notably that of Nidal Hassan, who killed 13 people at Ft. Hood in 2009 (there was also a Seattle man who killed four people last year and claimed it was revenge for American military actions).
So why doesn't it happen more here? The answer is that unlike their European counterparts, American Muslims are as a group extremely assimilated and patriotic. So there's virtually no one here who wants to carry out such an attack. Our relative safety on this score isn't a triumph of intelligence, it's a triumph of the American culture of welcoming immigrants.
I realize that to somebody like John McCain, that's deeply unsatisfying, because it doesn't involve invading somebody. And it doesn't mean that an attack from a home-grown terrorist wielding nothing more than a gun might not happen here, because it might. But it's almost impossible to stop; the best thing we can do to prevent those kinds of attacks is what we've been doing (for the most part), which is to create a society in which there are as few people as possible who would even contemplate doing such a thing.