The world was horrified this week as footage emerged from France of a Syrian refugee going insane and stabbing multiple very young children in a public park in a Parisian suburb:
Thankfully, nobody was killed in the incident. That's partly due to the actions of some brave citizens who stepped in to distract the attacker away from his most vulnerable victims. Good for them. Not everyone will step up and do what's necessary in an emergency like this.
In the U.S., of course, where well over 20 million people hold concealed carry permits, the situation likely would have ended even sooner, with even fewer injuries to young children.
But this is France, where almost literally nobody is allowed to carry guns. And so it went down like this:
The attacker slashed at the 24-year-old man with the knife that he used to savagely stab one young child after another. But rather than run, Henri held his ground — using a weighty backpack he was carrying to swing at the assailant and parry his blade.
French media hailed Henri as "the hero with a rucksack" Friday...
Henri was indeed a hero. No doubts there. The injustice, of course, is that neither he nor any other average citizen in the country is permitted to carry the tool that would have best protected him and others around him, i.e., a gun.
Henri, meanwhile, noted that he was not the lone respondent to the crisis:
"I am far from alone in having reacted. Many other people around started, like me, to run after him to try to scare him, push him away. And other people immediately went over to the children to take care of the injured."
"I remember there was also a municipal worker who arrived from the right with a large plastic shovel to try to hit him," Henri said.
Rucksacks. Shouting. Pushing. A "large plastic shovel." All useful in their own way, of course. Not so useful as, you know, a responsibly wielded firearm.
I suppose French citizens have made their peace with that. In the U.S. we have not and hopefully never will. Here we retain the right to arm ourselves to protect our communities from lunatics. We saw that play out in spectacular fashion last year in Indiana:
"Gun control" might sound good to some in theory, but let me ask you this: What do you do when there's a strong man carrying a large knife running around stabbing children in your park?
