No Tonto! It will only escalate the violence.
Posted on 11/29/2008 11:17:52 AM PST by Leisler
It is the photograph that has dominated the world's front pages, casting an astonishing light on the fresh-faced killers who brought terror to the heart of India's most vibrant city. Now it can be revealed how the astonishing picture came to be taken by a newspaper photographer who hid inside a train carriage as gunfire erupted all around him.
Sebastian D'Souza, a picture editor at the Mumbai Mirror, whose offices are just opposite the city's Chhatrapati Shivaji station, heard the gunfire erupt and ran towards the terminus. "I ran into the first carriage of one of the trains on the platform to try and get a shot but couldn't get a good angle, so I moved to the second carriage and waited for the gunmen to walk by," he said. "They were shooting from waist height and fired at anything that moved. I briefly had time to take a couple of frames using a telephoto lens. I think they saw me taking photographs but theydidn't seem to care."
The gunmen were terrifyingly professional, making sure at least one of them was able to fire their rifle while the other reloaded. By the time he managed to capture the killer on camera, Mr D'Souza had already seen two gunmen calmly stroll across the station concourse shooting both civilians and policemen, many of whom, he said, were armed but did not fire back. "I first saw the gunmen outside the station," Mr D'Souza said. "With their rucksacks and Western clothes they looked like backpackers, not terrorists, but they were very heavily armed and clearly knew how to use their rifles.
"Towards the station entrance, there are a number of bookshops and one of the bookstore owners was trying to close his shop," he recalled. "The gunmen opened fire and the shopkeeper fell down."
But what angered Mr D'Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. "There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything," he said. "At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, 'Shoot them, they're sitting ducks!' but they just didn't shoot back."
As the gunmen fired at policemen taking cover across the street, Mr D'Souza realised a train was pulling into the station unaware of the horror within. "I couldn't believe it. We rushed to the platform and told everyone to head towards the back of the station. Those who were older and couldn't run, we told them to stay put."
The militants returned inside the station and headed towards a rear exit towards Chowpatty Beach. Mr D'Souza added: "I told some policemen the gunmen had moved towards the rear of the station but they refused to follow them. What is the point if having policemen with guns if they refuse to use them? I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera."
India is not a uniform country, with uniform values. Languages of India, for starters.
Assamese
Bengali
Gujarati
Hindi
Kannada
Kashmiri
Malayalam
Marathi
Nepali
Oriya
Punjabi
Sanskrit
Sindhi
Sinhalese
Tamil
Telugu
Urdu
Balti
Khasi
Konkani
Hindustani
Maldivian
Manipuri
Pali
General
“I don’t know where the city pulls its police from, nor the moral nor the training of these unfortunates”
Your knowledge of their training matters not one whit. What matters is that 200 civilians are dead and Many of the police did nothing.
And why do you call the do-nothing police “unfortunates”? Save your sympathy for the hundreds that died while they were twiddling their thumbs.
And I am just as critical over the do-nothing police agencies involved in the American Columbine debacle.
Our basic infantry is “elite” today, under those definitions. The entire specops community is pretty much at the Sgt. York level.
Our level of training today isn’t WWII-quality.
“Why do you think the Marine Corps can take anyone from any background and make him a world class assault troop? They have some secret test to pick killers, or is it training and conditioning?”
Uh, they can’t. Many washed out of the Navy (my branch) for this very reason. More was out of the USMC. Even more wash out of the Special Services. In proportion of course.
The Indian police behaved badly. And all your casuistry will not make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
These men failed as a force-—that was training. They also failed as individuals-—that is integrity (the lack thereof).
“And,getting back to your powers of observation, you haven’t ventured as to why, it appears, all the police held their fire?”
D’Sousa noted the obvious: A lack of courage and a lack of initiative.
“Sounds like some sort of edict, some sort of training, or some combination.”
And none is excusable.
Guess what?
No country is a uniform county.
Around these parts, that's true. I know of one spot on the New River, where to get to the other side one needs to drive for nearly an hour. lol
Leisler,
You love to argue. Here in America, we would say you have Diarrhea of the mouth.
Some Would say you are educated beyond your intelligence. You obviously are very young or very naive about man’s duties to his fellow man. You would not, I am coming to realize, go to the assistance of these unarmed civilians were you in a similar situation.
You remind me of one of my cousins who was a Communist nun-—a Cesar Chavez sycophant. She would argue a wrong cause until she was (or more likely, you) blue in the face. She said, the world needs Communism. I said, “No, the world needs Jesus.”
You arguments are specious, however, because you are trying to justify the inexcusable-— inaction and cowardice on the part of the armed Indian police.
Each one of these men had a moral obligation to engage the terrorists-—irrespective of his training, his lack of leadership, his ancestry, his culture.
They acted as fools and as criminals. End of argument.
Remember, in India everybody but everybody is dirty poor and bullets are expensive. Presuming nothing ever happens on the job the cops must be under tremendous pressure to simply sell their bullets.
Then there's the pretty basic issue of firing a pistol at a guy with a machinegun.
Without good cover (and I don't mean a board, or a plaster wall) that is foolhardy and would almost never result in success against the guy with the machinegun.
This issue will undoubtedly be subjected to public review and the answer is going to be more along the lines I suggest than that the cops were simply cowardly, although that could be true in some cases.
But none of us here are charged with protecting the lives of travellers at a train station.
We see swarms of police officers at Penn Station NY, Grand Central Station, etc.
The thought that they would not shoot someone who appeared in the station with a gun like that is terrifying.
Given that you have to give your first born to get a concealed carry permit in NY
People’s response in these conditions is largely based on self image. People will fight harder to perserve their self image than their lives. The Marine Corps (and the military in general) know this and try to instill in their personnel the self image of tiger rather than a lamb.
No Tonto! It will only escalate the violence.
“I have muslim acquaintances who are actually blaming the Hindus for the attack.”
I have seen this same attitude time and time again with muslims. They NEVER think other muslims did anything violent, no matter how obvious the basic facts. It’s a level of brainwashing that can only be described as insanity.
I wondered who got those amazing photos and how he did it. What a story!
I wonder what the police patrolling the NYC subways would do...and those at Grand Central Station and Penn Station.
If I rode the trains in the Met NY area, I would carry a concealed gun, license be damned!
You have to keep up on this stuff ~ they are much more dangerous than most Westerners can imagine.
You’re referring to studies by S.L.A. Marshall’s “Men Against Fire,” and the claims made therein are not without substantial controversy. It appears that Marshall’s source data wasn’t nearly as good as he would have liked to claim.
LTC (ret) Grossman’s work “On Killing” is more substantial, and claims that, yes, most people are who not experienced for de-sensitized prior to events show reluctance to fire.
Americans, as a rule, are less sensitive in these issues than other cultures. Americans are, on the whole, more violent and aggressive than many, many other cultures around the world. So while we Americans are wondering “WTF?” in the reluctance for anyone with arms and opportunity to engage the terrorists, remember that other cultures are not like American culture. We have a unique culture which, quite frankly, scares the crap out of many other cultures around the world in our propensity for all levels of violence - including just being the crap out of someone with fists and anything else close at hand.
And I’m not talking about our hardened combat veterans - of which we have many more than the rest of the world. I’m talking about our common “Joe American” in the street — has the capability to scare the crap out of people from the rest of the world for just being himself. That we have so many combat vets who are not, as the media portrays them to the rest of the world, shambolic psychos wandering around the halls of state pysch wards, but well-adjusted pillars of their communities - and who are big fuzzy teddy bears with barely concealed claws - scares many non-Americans to death.
I’ve seen this over and over and over again in Silicon Valley, where we’d have people from all over the world show up to work. When they’d travel outside the little enclave of the Bay Area in California, they were genuinely scared of Americans - until they got to know them.
Furriners just don’t ‘get’ us - at all. If an American were in that situation and had arms and started shooting back, you can bet your hangie-down parts that the world pretty would be having a cow right about now.
Is this just inadequate training of the indian police?
(Not trained properly, freeze up under stress?)
I understand that happened a lot in the Falklands. The Argentine draftees were well dug in, had superior numbers, but most never fired their rifles...
That would be a tribute to the all volunteer force. The report I sited would of course been draftees. It makes all the difference I guess.
I don't agree at all. There are plenty of occasions where people have taken down the perps with concerted action.
If we can believe news reports there were 15 perps all told. They were split of into teams of two.
If "masses of armed police" can't take out 2 perps then ehre's something deeper going on here that none of us don't understand.
But you conention that nobody knows what they would do until they came up against this situation is just goofy from the outset.
Todd Beamer and his pals taught us what people CAN do.
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