An unarmed society is a sitting duck society.
Via AP:
The vibe in the Bataclan concert hall was hot, steamy and electric as the California rock band Eagles of Death Metal jammed away a half-hour into a set. Revelers slam-danced to the hard rock, and bodies glistened with sweat. Suddenly, the drum beats gave way to a different kind of rat-a-tat-tat-tat, and flashing stage lights met with glints from automatic rifle barrels.
In the spasm of chaos, some revelers thought the lights and sounds were part of the show. Then the lead singer fled, bodies began to fall — and shouts of partying turned to screams of horror.
It was the beginning of the worst carnage of the Paris attacks that killed 130 people, injured over 300, and caused the French president to declare his nation at war with Islamic State extremists. The legendary music venue in a shabby-chic corner of Paris turned into a chamber of death that one policeman described as “Dante’s Inferno,” as three men laden with explosives and toting Kalashnikovs fired indiscriminately at revelers, turning the dance floor into a sea of blood and body parts.
“I crawled on the ground as low as possible without getting up,” said Arthur, one of the Bataclan fans, who didn’t give his last name. “I scrambled for the emergency exit on the left. We all crawled. Others tried to walk out and stepped on an arm or two.”[…]
As the attackers mowed people down, a police commissioner and his driver, learning from the police radio that they were near the site, sped to the concert hall before more elite teams could get there. They charged inside, shooting one of the gunmen before the attacker had a chance to use his high-powered rifle. Then they retreated so that special-operations teams could assemble.
It was a key action that slowed the pace of carnage. “In hindsight, I know that we saved dozens, maybe hundreds of lives,” the commissioner, who hasn’t been named, told private television channel M6. While the Bataclan death toll of at least 89 was horrific, most of the partygoers survived.
“It’s their action that made it possible to stop the killing,” Christophe Molmy, who heads the elite BRI police intervention squad, said of the police commissioner and his driver. When Molmy’s rapid-reaction team arrived at 10:15, “there’s no shooting, there’s no noise, there’s an oppressive silence inside the Bataclan.”
Inside, the remaining gunmen took hostages and used them as human shields or as go-betweens with police — ordered to tell the elite police teams to stay back. One concertgoer, who only gave his first name, Sebastien, was among the hostages. He said he inexplicably survived after a surreal face-to-face conversation with the attackers. Speaking on RTL radio, he said the extremists wanted to send a message of resistance to France’s government for its role in coalition air strikes against the Islamic State group in Syria.
“They told us it was just the beginning. And that war was starting now. And they were there in the name of Islamic State,” said Sebastien, who like other survivors has chosen to protect his identity. “Then they asked us whether we agreed with them. So I’ll let you imagine the silence that followed. The timid ones nodded. The braver ones said ‘yes.'”