Ex-Navy SEAL Dom Raso is no stranger to defending his beliefs on the Second Amendment. After releasing a video bashing gun-free zones, Raso is back with NRA News detailing how malls can become a target of radical Islamic terrorism.
Having hunted down terrorists for 12 years in the SEALs, Raso believes he has unique insight into the thought process of those who wish to do us harm. According to him, gun-free malls are the new easy targets for radical terrorists.
Raso first references a mass shooting in Nairobi, Kenya, where sixty-three people were brutally murdered with almost two hundred more injured at Westgate Shopping Mall. He goes on to lay out a scenario where another terrorist could plan an attack to try and outdo even that horrific act. You can watch below here:
Raso submits that, “the people who want to restrict your right to bear arms will call [his analysis] fear-mongering. They’ll say it almost certainly will never to happen to you. Maybe it won’t. But it will happen to someone. And what if that someone is you? And what if it is your family?”
Malls certainly present a large target for those looking to “one-up” mass-shooters of the past. Security certainly can’t cover all areas of the mall adequately to prevent another such event. At a place where hundred of people congregate to shop, all with no means of defending themselves, it becomes an all-too-easy target.
Allowing citizens to carry firearms within a mall, given that they have certification in their given state, would go a long way towards preventing terrorist attacks. Even if only one in ten people who visit a mall decide to carry, that already exponentially increases the possibility that a potential shooter gets stopped early on.
The potential for collateral damage is vastly outweighed by the risk of letting a radical terrorist roam around unopposed. If untrained shooters missing the mark is really a concern, mandated training to carry would be an improvement on the status quo that most people should be able to get behind.
Even if the number of terrorist attempts remained the same, it’s hard to argue that their success rate would drop heavily once they started facing opposition. Arming citizens isn’t a cure-all, but it’s certainly far superior to creating a culture of sitting ducks in large public spaces.
If we continue to ignore the problem, our enemies at home and abroad will be emboldened to carry out attacks of greater and greater magnitude. It doesn’t take a vast national security state to secure our liberties, it just requires that citizens are allowed to protect their property and persons by force when necessary. As best said by Raso, “either we deal with reality as it is, not as we wish it was … or face the consequences.”