UKC

Shootings in Canadian Parliament Building:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/ottawa-shooting-canadian-s...

In reply to mypyrex:

And hard on the heels of the incident two days ago where 2 soldiers were 'run down' - killing one of them - by an alleged ' Jihadi convert'.

The latest on t'interweb is that the Canadian Police and Army are hunting a number of gunmen following the parliament shooting.

In reply to Lord of Starkness:

I think we are going to see more incidents like this throughout all countries which have joined the fight against IS. It shows that IS is a very dangerous movement and although relatively small has the ability to hit out hard. That's where terrorists have a huge advantage - low overheads and hard hitting which makes headlines.

In reply to Trangia:

Agreed, also it's a "war" that we HAVE to win.

In reply to mypyrex:

Ironically Anders Breivik showed the world that just one nut with a gun can be far more effective at causing panic and outrage than any bomb. We have become so used to bombings that they almost seem natural disasters and barely raise a general feeling of unease, gunmen on the rampage are far better at gathering news hours.

In reply to mypyrex:


With the amount of hardware the police there seem to have it shouldn't be too long..!

In reply to Clarence:

Agree. I remember reading a security expert in the press saying that they are worried about a mumbai style attack in London. He went on to mention a scenario where a few gunmen could secure the ground level of a office block in Canary Wharf which would effectively have a few thousand people immediately hostage and they can then go through the floors slaughtering virtually at will with automatic weapons.

Have to say I looked into escape routes when I read that

In reply to mypyrex:


I don't think that this kind of thinking or the war analogy is really that helpful. Witness the successes of the Wars on Drugs, Poverty, Cancer and, of course, Terror.

I also think it is worth drawing a line between IS and homegrown terrorists. There have, and probably always will be, homegrown acts of terror (for want of a better term). Before The current fashion for islamist terrorism there were, variously, the Oklahoma bombing, Unabomber, Dunblane, Hungerford, Baader-Meinhof - stretching all the way back to the anarchists and probably before that. There will always be a % of cranks and whether they blow themselves or other people up in the name of nationalism, anti-imperial technology, anarchism, left-wing idealism, right win idealism or just plain no-other-reason-than-having-a-screw-loose I'm not sure it makes much difference.

Then you have IS which, clearly, is a different type of threat. One which, "war" is perhaps a more appropriate response except that - even there - I don't see it being won by bombing the place flat. Maybe it doesn't really help us to think of it as a war & I certainly don't think that "winning" in the conventional sense is how it will end.

In reply to Bob Hughes:

The common factor in the two Canadian killings and that here of Fusilier Rigby is that these are the murders of persons serving in the Armed forces and there is some specific targeting. I'm afraid it probably puts us back to the 1980s and 1990s when I served in the armed forces and uniforms weren't worn at anytime except on base, at that time it was the threat from the IRA.

As an aside two years ago I walked across the grass in the front of the Canadian parliament building with my wife, son, one of my best mates (now serving with the Canadian navy) and his wife. Just glad we weren't there yesterday.

In reply to Bob Hughes:

I'm always intrigued by 'terrorists' lack of historical perspective. How many terror groups have achieved their objectives, South Africa might be an exception, Ireland a partial success. I guess you could argue any country that has achieved independence, although the solution is always the result of political rather than military activity IMO.

Anybody remember what Baader-Meinhof were on about? Imposing you will/views/beliefs on others never works long term, sooner or later you've just got to find a way to get on with them.

Steve D

In reply to Clarence:


Beivik's case was more complex than that though, because he had just committed Norway's first terrorist bombing - the emergency services were so focused on that it hugely reduced their capacity to respond to the first reports of the shooting attack.

In reply to GrendeI:


In the US this is a result of the wars... The US have a massive amount of armored trucks they want rid of so the police can use government grants to buy war stock cheaply...

There's pictures of armored personnel carriers outside schools when 3 years ago it would have been a squad car.. There's been massive militarization of the police..

In reply to TobyA:

True but if you ask most people what he did, it will be the shootings that they remember first. To be honest I had completely forgotten about the bomb.

In reply to SteveD:

Vietnam?

In reply to Clarence:

Yep I agree, in terms of people murdered it was far more shocking BUT my point was just had he not set off the bomb, he might not have been able to kill so many people on the island. And of course there were victims of his bomb too, killed and survivors, and we should not forget them.