Monday Open Comments

Law professor Glenn Reynolds writes…

So I just finished Kurt Schlichter’s new novel, The Attack. It’s a fictionalized account of an October 7 style attack that takes place on a large scale in the United States. It’s also a warning.

In essence, Iranian terror experts use America’s open southern border to slip in thousands of Islamist fanatics, sleeper cells who are primed to attack specified targets on command. The terrorists don’t know their targets until the last minute, when they get guns, ammunition, and directions. They also don’t know that they’re part of a massive effort. This means that if they turn, or are caught, as a few do or are, they can’t give anything away. They have minimal training, basically how to lay low, and to shoot guns and throw grenades. They’re also equipped with web-linked cameras to stream their attacks, and the atrocities – rape, torture, etc. – that they perpetrate on their victims. Also meth to pump them up for the attacks.

and,

It’s a gripping story, and an unfortunately plausible cautionary tale. How likely is it to happen?

Probably the biggest impediment to something like this happening in America is the aftermath of the 10/7 attacks on Israel. Atrocities didn’t cow the Israelis, but angered them. Other nations, even many of those that the Palestinians of Hamas generally looked to for support, turned against them. Hamas leaders are being targeted and killed, Hamas backers know they aren’t safe, and the Israelis simply continue to grind away, four months after the attacks happened.

and this,

Schlichter’s book includes a number of times where armed civilians blunt an attack, both in public and in homes. A civilian or two with handguns can’t stop a group of men armed with long guns, but they can slow, distract, and inflict enough casualties to mess things up. (Jeff Cooper said that one man with a handgun can wreck a rifle squad; certainly if the man is Jeff Cooper!) But it’s math: If you go house to house and one of you gets shot every time, you’ll run out of terrorists long before you run out of houses.

And, of course, some neighborhoods are better armed than that. My neighbor’s gun safe makes mine look tiny, and we’re pretty well equipped here at Stately InstaPundit Manor. I can have a handgun anywhere in my house in seconds, and an AR-15 type rifle with a full mag in under a minute. If a bunch of terrorists started breaking my door down I’d probably die, but they’d know they’d been in a fight. And there are a lot of people like that in my neighborhood. We saw in Israel that places where people fought back – like Kibbutz Kerem Shalom – did much better.

RTWDT.

The Attack by Kurt Schlicter