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> Basically, the French security system has been revealed as completely ineffective. How can a country possibly prevent these things while still maintaining a

• dragonwriter 11y ago
  > How can a country possibly prevent these things while still maintaining a free society? You can't even prevent them when not being a free society. Its not like terrorism only occurs in free societies.
  • RogtamBar 11y ago
    This is bullshit and you know this. There is very little chance of anyone successfully getting up to terrorism if society is a) riddled with informers b) detaining people without charges is legal c) totalitarian ideology and political supremacy makes the establishment of parallel societies impossible. Border controls make importing terrorists next to impossible. The former eastern Bloc had no terrorist incidents. Pulling them off would be harder, the state would cover it up, etc. Just like it had practically no mob. It did have a great many terrorists, mostly in various training camps.
    • stefantalpalaru 11y ago
      > The former eastern Bloc had no terrorist incidents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorism_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorism_in_the_Sovi...
    • rdtsc 11y ago
      > The former eastern Bloc had no terrorist incidents. Yeah, the whole Eastern Block was one big terrorist incident All the terrorists in the world combined have nothing on Stalin's death count.
    • vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      Usually in such a society the state is the terrorist.
    • dang 11y ago
      > This is bullshit and you know this. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • clock_tower 11y ago
      The Eastern Bloc had plenty of terrorism, as well as organized crime -- who do you think was supplying all those black markets? Being a police state is one thing; being an _effective_ police state is something else, much harder (at least in the pre-computer era). In the Soviet case, it didn't help that they didn't really care much about crime...
      • RogtamBar 11y ago
        Plenty of terrorism? USSR funded and commited plenty of terrorism, but I've yet to hear of any terrorist incidents prior to the perestroila.. Soviets did have some organized crime, but they were well, Russians. GDR, Czechoslovakia, etc, somewhat less inept countries had very little crime and no organized crime to speak of.
        • sirrocco 11y ago
          What was the cost of that "safety" ? There is no such thing as a free lunch it seems
        • dragonwriter 11y ago
          > Plenty of terrorism? USSR funded and commited plenty of terrorism, but I've yet to hear of any terrorist incidents prior to the perestroila.. While the regime exercised strong control of information prior to glasnost, and had plenty of motive to repress information that would indicate weakness of the regime, there are numerous known hijackings, the 1977 Moscow bombings, and others. (While reliable information about responsibility for some, and any broader organizational responsibility that might be behind those clearly responsible for others, is hard to come by, there does seem to be a disproportionate link to Armenia among the known incidents, with some specifically linked to Armenian nationalists.)
      • abalashov 11y ago
        Former Soviet national here... In the Soviet case, it didn't help that they didn't really care much about crime... What gives you that idea?
    • jacquesm 11y ago
      No terrorism that you'd hear of anyway. But the former USSR was anything but the solid unified entity you might think it was. There was tons of strife and occasional acts of terrorism as well as attempts by states to break away from the mothership, all of which were characterized as acts of terror by the leaders. One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter, and the former USSR had plenty of the latter.
• toyg 11y ago
  By making the secret services work for their money on real problems, instead of fretting about tapping media pirates and suchlike. By having a foreign policy that does not rely on military intervention at the drop of a hat. By not starting fires all over the place. The list is long and well-known.
  • S4M 11y ago
    I don't think any secret service could prevent any isolated individual to make at home, say, Molotov cocktails, and throw them by car in a crowd.
    • toyg 11y ago
      But these weren't isolated individuals. This was an organised network with grenades and assault rifles and the training to handle them. This is not a Breivik, or a "Shoe Bomber" Reid; this is '70s-style, organised, cross-border terrorism -- the sort of which "we" were supposed to be good at handling by now.
• Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  They can't; even the not free societies - think prisons - are not safe. People that want to do Bad Things will do them. Even if they didn't have guns or weapons, they could've - for example - get enough people into a dinner party or restaurant, have everyone grab a fork, and start stabbing people in the eye. Terrorism doesn't need weaponry. The only deterrent would be to read people's minds, and you've probably watched Minority Report and other such dystopian scenarios. It's something that needs to be solved at the root, and TBF I don't believe it can be fixed.
  • jacquesm 11y ago
    I'm a bit more optimistic, I think it can be fixed but it will take many years (decades).
  • DrScump 11y ago
    Terrorism doesn't need weaponry. Indeed. Even if you deem well-coordinated attacks with just edged weapons (like the fictional ones in "The Following") unlikely, note that the Multiple-Victim public homicide with the most fatalities in US history used not a single firearm. (and I'm not talking about 9/11, although it could count as such as well)
• fein 11y ago
  Arm your citizens. Edit: Seems HN would rather die on their knees. Shame.
  • blisterpeanuts 11y ago
    This is not such a bad idea. Unfortunately, it won't help in controlled places like a concert hall (as tonight) where patrons will be scanned at the door. If not today, undoubtedly they'll start doing a lot more of this. On the street and in restaurants, that's another story.
    • fein 11y ago
      Or carrying concealed could be allowed there too. Scanners didn't stop this.
    • darkr 11y ago
      Depends if the French are as disposed to shooting each other as Americans are. Over 10,000 Americans are killed by gun violence every year. This is excluding ~19,000 firearm suicides. Since 9/11, the number of U.S. citizens killed in terrorist attacks each year has never surpassed 75.
      • blisterpeanuts 11y ago
        According to bjs.gov (Bureau of Justice Statistics), it's been around 11-12,000 gun homicides in recent years, down from around 16,000 a few years ago. Over half of those are black-on-black shootings, mainly gang related. If you control for these gangland shootings, the per capita rate in the U.S. is about the same as Western Europe and Canada. The U.S. has a socio-economic problem in the ghetto areas, not a gun problem per se, unless you want to argue that it's too easy for gangbangers to obtain guns. Law abiding citizens with guns aren't doing most of the shootings. Suicides, that's a different story.
        • Asbostos 11y ago
          I suspect law abiding black citizens in gangland ghettos aren't doing most of the shootings either. What you've done here is to subdivide the whole American population into a group of "not many shooters" and "Higher proportion of shooters". Of course you can always do that, and always find a more specific group that dominates the statistics for any type of crime. But there's a worrying implication that we should somehow allow non-gang members to have guns but ban them from gang members. Or allow people in rich neighborhoods to have guns but ban them from ghettos. Or even, dare I say it, ban them from black people. Really we need to ban guns from shooters. But there's no way to identify them without catching a lot of harmless people up in the same net. Even poor black gang members can be harmless.