Armed Defense Against Pirates Works

Gun Watch ^ | 6 March, 2014 | Dean Weingarten

[marktwain]

Buried in the LA Times Entertainment section is some interesting news about the Maersk Alabama, the ship that was attacked by Somali pirates early in the Obama Presidency.  In the last paragraph of the article, it is casually mentioned that the ship was attacked three more times in the next two years!  From the LA Times:

But while Phillips' story -- and by extension, "Captain Phillips" -- had a happy ending, the Maersk Alabama has not been so fortunate, facing further pirate assaults in recent years. The ship was attacked a second time in 2009, again in 2010 and yet again in 2011. Each time, though, the assailants were repelled by armed security forces.

So, the ship went from being defenseless in early 2009, to having armed guards. In the first instance, the ship is taken over, the Captain is taken hostage, the U.S. military intervenes and ends up shooting three of the pirates, rescuing Captain Phillips.

In the next three situations, the armed guards repel the pirates before they ever board the ship. That seems a much better result to me.

Funny that we end up reading about news like this in the Entertainment section of a paper discussing the movie made about the original incident. David Codrea deserves the H/T.

©2014 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included. Link to Gun Watch

[House Atreides]

The videos were a hoot. It’s very fortunate that the little girl in the 2nd video wasn’t in the first video scaring the elephant at the “critical” time—it wouldn’t have been a good time for the elephant to be afflicted with “pucker factor”.

[NFHale]

I imagine that, had the elephant been so afflicted, that poor unfortunate zookeeper would have been ROCKETED out of the cave, as it were, by the compression caused by “immovable object” (otherwise known as his head) blocking the exhaustion of intestinal gasses building up inside the artificially impacted pachyderm...

It would probably set a new land speed record for an expelled projectile object...