Arming India Against Terrorism - WSJ.com

Arming India Against Terrorism - WSJ.com
For three bloody days, just 10 determined killers held a city of 18 million hostage. The sheer ignominy of this fact has jolted Mumbaikars -- and Indians -- out of their fabled chalta hai (anything goes) attitude, and into a burst of citizen activism. Even Mumbai's business community has shed its habitual political timidity and filed an extraordinary public-interest lawsuit demanding that the government fulfill its constitutional obligation to protect its citizens.

But Indians shouldn't just stop there. They should also demand reform of the country's draconian gun laws -- a holdover from British times -- that prevent them from defending themselves. That would surely deliver far quicker results than waiting for India's slow-moving political classes to plug the vast lacunae in the country's security apparatus.

After all, what was particularly infuriating about the Mumbai attacks was not just that the Indian government failed to prevent them, even though it had received repeated warnings. Nor was it their tragic death toll; Mumbai, after all, experienced worse in the coordinated series of bombings in 1993 and 2006. Rather, it was that had there been anything resembling meaningful resistance, the attackers never would have been able to stage the kind of spectacle they did. Before they holed up in the Taj and Oberoi Hotels, they seemed to operate with almost complete impunity, freely moving from one target to another.