One of the responses from my fellow Americans is a call for additional military action in Syria and Iraq. After all the several trillion dollars we have spent so far have yielded such outstanding results. One of the calls for more bombing complained we were being too restrictive in an attempt to avoid civilian casualties. We should just drop more bombs and not worry about collateral damage. I'm a reasonable human being. I try to see things from the viewpoint of the other person. If I'm in Syria and trying to survive as a noncombatant and you start dropping bombs indescriminantly resulting in the death of some of my family. I would be very easy to convince to join the fight. Our group has no air force and no way to inflict that kind of pain on you in the same way. Would I go to your country and kill civilians? You are killing innocents in my homeland. Why wouldn't or shouldn't I in yours? I think the idea of just bombing away makes the problem worse.
The typical response when someone with a gun kills a bunch of people is more guns. If only France allowed concealed carry. If someone in one of the locations, or several people in each location had guns the outcome might have been different. More guns has been so effective in our country. Let's export our gun culture on stand your ground laws. Europe really needs to give that a try. I'm pretty sure in the last week or so we have had more people shot to death than died in France on Friday. They died in terror just not a terrorist attack. So we accept it as the price of safety.
Send thousands of troops to fight in the Middle East again. It has been ineffective as a strategy so far. It seems far fetched that it would work better this time. More dead and wounded troops. I have to agree with those who say that if you are unwilling to provide care and support for the families of the killed and wounded then you should not send them to fight. We are so quick to request their sacrifice and so slow to honor them for it. It also seems to me we are not fighting a ground war as much as we are battling an idea or a belief system. Beliefs and ideas are rarely changed by bullets and bombs.
So if you came here looking for solutions you are going to leave disappointed. I have none. I just know that what we have done so far has only managed to make the problem worse. The answer of too many is that we need more of what we have already tried. More guns, more bombs, more death. If that is the path we choose the result, I fear, will be more of what we saw in France on Friday.
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