Posted on 10/27/2017 4:17:11 AM PDT by Travis McGee
My first novel, Enemies Foreign and Domestic, published in 2003, begins with a sniper shooting into a packed football stadium. Ninety bullets are fired from long range into an upper deck, precipitating a stadium-wide panic stampede that results in over a thousand deaths. In the book, a combat veteran holding a semi-automatic rifle is quickly located by a SWAT counter-sniper in a helicopter, after a citizen’s tip is phoned to the police. However, the veteran is just a patsy, and the true perpetrators of the massacre are a pair of mid-level federal law enforcement agents who are seeking to increase their departmental budgets and overall bureaucratic power. The liberal mainstream media accept the false narrative without close examination. Right-leaning military veteran “gun nuts” are universally tarred as potential mass murderers. Within a week, semi-automatic so-called “assault rifles” are banned. (A link to the first chapter is below.)
My goal with the plot of Enemies Foreign and Domestic was to encourage news consumers not to blindly accept convenient official explanations after traumatic national events. Since the release of this novel, we have, in fact, seen federal agents and bureaucrats at a much higher level than my two fictional villains conspire to commit mass murder with the intention of spinning a false news narrative. We know this intentional mass murder plot as “Operation Fast and Furious”, whereby thousands of semi-automatic rifles from Southwestern gun dealers were deliberately sold to criminals with the expectation that they would be transported to violent cartels in Mexico. This resulted in mass carnage which would then be blamed on the Second Amendment and lax American gun laws. Honest gun dealers were coerced by the ATF into making otherwise illegal straw purchases to criminals in bulk quantities. No attempt was made to track the guns once they left ATF observation at the point of sale. The Mexican government was never informed of the murderous gun-running plan. Operation Fast and Furious was not a legitimate law enforcement operation gone wrong. It was a covert murder plan from start to finish, conceived and carried out for political purposes.
Before the evil scheme was exposed after the shooting death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in 2010, President Obama, Attorney General Holder, and Secretary of State Clinton were regularly touting as fact the lie that 90% of the guns found at Mexican murder scenes had originated in the USA. Eric Holder was found in contempt of Congress after stonewalling their attempts to investigate Operation Fast and Furious, when the half-hearted investigation was leading directly to his office. None of the principals behind this murderous plan have ever been held accountable. I revisit Fast and Furious in case any readers of this article learn the premise of my first novel and declare that federal law enforcement officials would never be involved in a mass murder scheme concocted for political ends. That Rubicon was already crossed with Operation Fast and Furious.
Since then, we have witnessed other scandals which involved selling the American public a false narrative. One example is the lie that the deadly attacks on our nearly undefended diplomatic missions in Benghazi were the result of an angry local response to an obscure video about the life of Mohammed. My point in recounting this history is to encourage Americans to always search beyond the “official narrative,” which, as we have seen, can sometimes be manufactured from whole cloth for public consumption. If the false narrative coincides with the liberal mainstream media’s underlying biases and preconceptions, you can be certain that very little honest journalism will be done to expose the lies and reveal the truth to the public.
This brings me to Las Vegas, with its ever-changing timelines and other dark mysteries, such as the motive of Stephen Paddock, the presumed shooter. Columnist Mark Steyn proposes a theory of the case that, in the absence of any declared motive or connections to international terrorism, “the medium is the message.” (Link is below.) In Las Vegas, then, the message would be that the ready availability of semi-automatic firearms constitutes a menace to American society, and the Second Amendment must be curtailed to prevent future massacres. Limiting the right of Americans to keep and bear arms has been a long-standing goal of the Left. So-called progressives well understand that their dream of imposing a “socialist utopia” cannot be achieved while Americans possess sufficiently effective weapons to mount a furious armed resistance. If Paddock had left a note declaring this end to be his true motive, he would have discredited his own purpose.
Of course, Paddock might have simply been a deranged psychopath, bent, for his own twisted reasons, upon topping the record books as America’s most successful mass shooter. We’ll never know because he’s conveniently dead and, apparently, he left no departing message. The lack of a declared motive, the ever-shifting timeline, and the fact that it took more than an hour after the shooting had ceased for the police to enter Paddock’s suite means that mystery may cloud the Las Vegas Massacre for years or decades to come.
One outcome is certain: millions of Americans are unlikely to accept any “official narrative” released after the investigation has concluded, and with good reason. The FBI and other federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies have squandered their reputations for honesty and integrity in recent years, and we can no longer assume that politics and corruption have not trumped even-handed truth telling.
This brings me to the NFL. In 2017, we are in a season of national discord, with American politics more radically polarized than since the 1960s, or perhaps even the years before the Civil War. The Las Vegas Massacre has shown us that billion-dollar corporations like MGM, as well as the Las Vegas police, were woefully unprepared to deal with a sniper standing in the window of a hotel overlooking an open-air concert.
Should we assume that the NFL is any better prepared to deal with a stadium sniper similar to the one described in the first chapter of my first novel?
Bear in mind that my fictional sniper was not perched high up in a stadium light tower, or hidden in the stands, but was located in a separate building three-quarters of a mile away. His rifle was aimed just over the near side of the stadium, dropping plunging fire into the opposite upper deck. Perimeter security measures taken to prevent firearms from being smuggled into a stadium will do nothing to hinder a distant sniper using this area-fire tactic. In my novel, a SWAT counter-sniper in a helicopter is able to kill the patsy left holding the rifle, but only after the shooting had ceased. But do NFL stadiums have police helicopters with counter-snipers standing by, ready to protect the fans who are packed in like sardines? And not only at the Super Bowl, but at each of the dozen or so weekly NFL games played in uncovered stadiums, or the hundreds of college games?
Greatly increasing the likelihood of a long-range sniper attack on a stadium is the fact that the distant sniper will have a good chance of getting clean away. In my first novel, three rifle magazines, ninety rounds, are enough to precipitate a panic stampede that kills over a thousand fans. If the distant shooter escapes, he can easily leave false clues at the scene, blaming his ideological enemies for the massacre. The Left can blame the Right, or black can blame white, or vice versa. Current events demonstrate that many, if not most, purported “hate crimes,” such as painted swastikas and nooses left at colleges, have been false-flag operations done to discredit the political enemies of the left-wing hoaxers.
Imagine the national outrage after a stadium massacre if overtly racist anti-black hate literature is found among the expended brass shells in the sniper’s lair, calling the mostly-white victims “race-traitors” for attending the NFL game in the wake of ongoing anthem-kneeling protests. The resulting social explosion would make the aftermath of the Las Vegas Massacre seem like a church picnic by comparison. This prospect must certainly be tempting to malefactors bent upon driving the United States toward civil war and anarchy. And, of course, an Islamic terrorist would need no reason beyond spreading terror among the infidels.
At an absolute minimum, large open air concerts and stadium events need a police helicopter with counter-snipers ready to launch on a moment’s notice. Acoustic gunshot detection systems must be installed around these venues to immediately locate a distant sniper’s location. Vectored to the area by the acoustic system, the helicopter’s onboard FLIR can rapidly find the sniper, and the airborne police counter-snipers can finish the job. Stopping a sniper after just a few minutes is a far better outcome than allowing him ten or more minutes of uninterrupted carnage, as in Las Vegas. Bear in mind that Paddock ceased shooting for his own reasons. The police did not stop him.
All the necessary elements (SWAT, counter-snipers, and police choppers) are typically already located in close proximity to these outdoor events. These elements need to be staged together, ready to fly, and able to detect gunshot locations as well as the FLIR signatures of open or broken-out windows in line-of-sight buildings, muzzle flashes, and humans hiding in unoccupied structures. The fatal fiasco of Desert One in 1980 largely resulted from a lack of coordination and practice between the disparate elements of the ad-hoc Iranian hostage rescue mission. In the aftermath, the U.S. military created the Joint Special Operations Command. Similarly, American law enforcement needs to rethink and revamp its approach to providing security for large outdoor events before a predictable tragedy occurs.
In addition, fans attending stadium and other large outdoor public events must be repetitively instructed to avoid blindly attempting to flee in the event of an emergency. Airline pre-flight safety instructions can be used as a model. In Las Vegas, most of the non-fatal injuries resulted from trampling, not from bullets.
A final note: in this article I chose a method of attack (indirect plunging fire from long range) that is simple, but would not be easy to pull off without considerable thought, planning, and practice. There are other tactics that I chose not to describe that would be equally as devastating, but would be much easier for an average maniac to employ. Law enforcement needs to think out of the box, and anticipate novel forms of attack.
They failed in Las Vegas.
Let’s hope they will not fail in the event of a stadium attack.
************************
Matthew Bracken was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1957, and attended the University of Virginia, where he received a BA in Russian Studies and was commissioned as a naval officer in 1979. Later that year, he graduated from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training and in 1983 he led a Naval Special Warfare detachment to Beirut, Lebanon. Links to his five novels, short stories, and essays may be found at EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com and at Matt’s Amazon page.
The original info I had gotten was from Sean Hannity via an interview of Bill O’Reilly days after the Las Vegas shooting.
Bush got Katrina, and was politically pummeled with it.
Trump got THREE hurricanes, plus wildfires, almost all at once and is coming out fine. MSM+Leftists are trying to pummel him over Puerto Rico infrastructure, but fact is rebuilding the entire electrical grid on a large island is time-consuming; I gather he’s using the opportunity to smack down the local cronyism/corruption in the process.
Ham radio involved? got a link?
“......mosque which was a hotbed of jihad radicals that had been under surveillance, was taken off surveillance, because of islamophobia, doncha know. Can’t say islamic jihad, only “countering violent extremism,” and no watching the radical mosques!”
Thank John Brennan for that change in nomenclature. He spearheaded this in collusion with Zero and the MB. It has arbitrarily trickled down to all aspects of government training manuals, the public education system and most unfortunately- counter-terrorism and the US Military.
The enemy is in the house thanks to the idiocy of the voting fools and their choice in 2008.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/obama-administration-pulls-references-islam-terror-training-materials-044605689.html
http://www.meforum.org/2949/john-brennan-jihad-holy-struggle
Matt, thanks for posting this. You may have just saved hundreds or thousands of lives, and the consequences (for the 2nd Amendment) that would result. Why? Because if the scenario is out there in the public, it likely won’t be attempted (and this is especially the case if some of the security measures that you proposed are actually implemented), because then it would be too obvious.
It is amazing how vulnerable our open society is to truly catastrophic attacks that would be simple to carry out. Bridge and tunnel attacks with truck bombs, for example, would kill thousands and interrupt transportation for hundreds of thousands (3 such bombs on the western side of NYC would largely paralyze our financial capitol - the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and the George Washington Bridge). Fuel depots and refinery complexes could similarly be easily attacked. Sports stadiums and concert locations aren’t the only vulnerable areas.
Such is the price of having an open society - and I’ll take it because a lot more than mere vulnerability goes with that (and we risk a lot of positive things if we ever attempt to eliminate that vulnerability).
Again, thanks. I’ll be avoiding big crowds.
“But it would be kind of funny to see a quad rotor drone chasing football players around the field.”
If you can’t trust the FBI and ATF, who can you trust?
/sarc
Exactly, and how many can fly a Cessna? Plenty. Paddock could have.
Sorry, correct, White Snake.
The video of those people stacked up, then burning alive, is gut wrenching, as bad as any ISIS film.
John Brennan, who admitted voting for Communist Gus Hall in 1980, and who was credibly reported as having converted to Islam while stationed in Saudi Arabia.
I think paddock was a hit man, not a suicide bomber.
Seriously, how hard would it be to fly drones into stadiums with explosives? Talk about “disruption”...
Might not kill hundreds or thousands, but it would get “attention”.
And, how hard is it to make a mortar launcher? Relatively simple type of weapon, and plenty of folks in Iraq and Afghanistan used that to some early successes against coalition troops.
I only ask that the Jihadis aim for the field, not the stands...
Yep. The Soviet army suffered massive casualties in an attack on a convoy in an A-stan tunnel. I would not even post much more than that in open forum, it’s too easy and too dreadful if carried out.
Ancestral Hunter,
Avoid crowds and be careful in the woods if you live in NY. There have been several sightings of a wild and dangerous angry Hildabeast creature on the move.
>>>(3 such bombs on the western side of NYC would largely paralyze our financial capitol - the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and the George Washington Bridge). <<< <<<
This nearly happened 25 yrs ago. The plot foiled in 1993 after two years of FBI surveillance and infiltration.
The “NYC landmark bomb plot” was to be a follow-up to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing designed to inflict mass casualties with a death toll in the thousands.
The plot was a creation of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheik -a radical Muslim cleric in NYC imprisoned for the first WTC bombing.
The 6 targets to be attacked were the United Nations HQ, Lincoln Tunnel, Holland Tunnel, GW Bridge, St. Regis & U.N. Plaza hotels, and the FBI’s NY office at the Javits Fed. Building. There was also some talk of bombing Jewish centers or the Diamond District, assassinating U.S. Senator Al D’Amato and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
The little drones could easily cause a massive panic stampede (the real killer) just by releasing a noxious mist over the crowds. Even spray paint could be taken for poison gas, initiating mass hysteria.
The no hard drive lap top might explain his murderous rampage. I know I’ve been really mad at Best Buy for selling me crappy laptop... Yup, he was mad because he got ripped off at best buy...that is the story and we’ll stick with it unless proven wrong...
Remember the Station night club fire? Yeah, a panic stricken crowd would stampede like cattle and no doubt cause even more casualties. And, the amount of cameras provide ultimate exposure to the “cause”.
The poor NBA and NFL would lose so much money in lost ticket sales, that the Federal govt would have to bail them out...
I suppose we don’t know, what we don’t know. But it would certainly appear that these open air stadiums have certains risks...
But hey, let’s hassle a nun about per possible involvement as a terrorist before boarding an airplane instead...
Not just stadiums but any gathering of innocent potential victims. Just this week, a Honduran in Miami tried to blow up Dolphin Mall. Made his ISIS videos and statements of support but Local 10 news/media already has stories out that there is “No connection to international terrorist”. He was on his way with the “fake” bomb supplied by FBI informant, tried to arm it and place it in the food court.
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