The bad guys always have the initiative.
Unless their "mission planning" is conducted via easily intercepted
communications, no one will know until the incident itself
begins to unfold.
Alert, armed and trained citizens probably won't deter such evil,
but will help mitigate the damage.
Budget cuts are happening all around, and you could argue:
"In an age of globally competitive knowledge work, we're cutting school
budgets and falling behind other countries."
"In an age in which our media landscape has become a cultural wasteland,
we're cutting funding for the fine arts."
"In an age of severe weather, we're cutting funding for warning
sytems, levee building and wildfire fighting."
And so on.
You can argue for or against any spending priority, but it seems as if
we've grown accustomed to asking our governments at every level
to do too much, for too long. Something has to give, and it's probably
best if every sector feel the pain of the fiscal scalpel.
