by David Clarke
3. Eliminate gun-free zones. Gun-free zones are killing fields.
As mass shootings continue to happen, some patterns are emerging from the after-action reports. I have seen several reports that point out why the assailant chose a location. It is a target rich for what the killer is trying to achieve: killing as many people as possible before being stopped. For that to occur, no other armed person can be nearby. The killer needs a gun-free zone.
In these cases, the incidents didn’t end until the assailant killed himself or an armed officer or another armed person confronted him.We may not be able to totally eliminate these mass shootings, but we can limit the carnage with a change of attitude about gun-free zones. Blame-the-gun advocates and proponents of gun-free zones hate to face these facts, but we need to have this discussion in the interest of sound public policy.
As the sheriff of a large urban county, I advise business establishments to take those No Firearms signs out of their windows and off the front door. Why? Malls and schools are notorious for bragging that they’re gun-free zones, but those signs are providing intelligence to mass killers by sending this message: it will be a while before anyone can confront you, so this is a target-rich environment, especially if your end game is suicide-by-cop. Killers choose their locations, in part, because the people in the area are like grazing sheep, ill prepared for an attack by a hungry wolf.
Regardless, I’m not going to order private businesses to take down these gun-free zone signs. That’s their choice. If a coffee place like Starbucks is a gun-free zone, I can buy coffee at a different location, I can brew coffee at home, or I can do without coffee that day. Though getting coffee is not a constitutional right, honoring the Second Amendment certainly is.
That’s why public spaces controlled by government should not be gun-free zones. If I want to go to a park, a public facility, the courthouse, or a state college campus, that’s a different story. I can’t get a birth certificate anywhere but a courthouse. Kids going to college have to live and study on government-controlled college campuses. But we’ve had shootings in courthouses and college campuses. They are anything but airtight.
As unwise as it is for the government to disarm regular, law-abiding citizens, it’s even worse that they disarm their law enforcement and military personnel. When the American government doesn’t trust its own military to carry the firearms they have been trained to use, it’s a sad day. It’s infinitely worse when some goof like Nidal Hasan uses a gun among all those soldiers, and they have been stripped of their right to fight back. Or when people like Mohammad Abdulazeez and Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad drive by military recruitment centers because they know our soldiers are sitting ducks.
Why are gun-free zones on military bases? Every soldier knows how to use a weapon. When deployed, soldiers carry weapons at all times, even on the bases that practically guarantee they’ll never encounter the enemy. According to the Washington Post, “current policy requires soldiers to register their own personal weapons with commanders and to keep those weapons in the arms room.”12 In other words, soldiers frequently would be safer if they were just walking down the street in their hometowns. This is a shame and a betrayal.
We cannot ignore or deny this any longer. Current public and business safety policy involving the prohibited carrying of firearms by law-abiding persons is too often designed from an emotional perspective and decades of conditioning that guns are evil. Guns are not evil. People are evil. Reasonable people would realize that only when a law-abiding person with a gun showed up did these mass killings end.
4. Quit planning for the last attack. After the marathon attack, Bostonians were understandably nervous when the race came around the following year. News sources reported that 3,500 police officers were deployed at the race, more than twice as many as usual, and spectators were asked not to bring backpacks. I don’t blame Boston officials for these security restrictions, but their excessive caution demonstrated that they did not trust US intelligence capability. Thankfully, a terror attack did not occur again at the marathon, but not because of the doubling of officers and the installing of additional surveillance cameras. Usually, terrorists do not strike in the same manner or location because they like to use the element of surprise.
Deploying a massive number of officers in an attempt to eliminate another intelligence failure is referred to as “planning for the last attack.” We did this after 9/11 as well. Assigning seven thousand officers last year would not have prevented that act of war. Only better intelligence collection, analysis, and dissemination (sharing) reduce the likelihood of terror attacks.
These same types of intelligence failures contributed to the 9/11 attacks, and the reaction was the same: the government inconvenienced millions of American travelers at airports, suspected every American of terror involvement to the point of trampling on previously protected constitutional freedoms, and gave the federal government broad authority to encroach on privacy. In addition, Congress increased intelligence spending and created the Department of Homeland Security, one of the largest federal agencies, with a growing budget that had reached more than $60 billion per year in 2012.13 In one of his rants, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, spiritual leader of al-Qaeda, indicated that part of the objective of the 9/11 terror attack in the United States was to turn the American people against their government for intruding on their freedoms and to bankrupt our government with security spending. Mission accomplished. Even after this overreaction, two known terror suspects were able to board separate commercial airliners, one with a bomb in his underwear, and the other with a bomb in his shoe; Nidal Hasan was able to exchange e-mails with known terrorist and bomb-maker al-Awlaki before he massacred thirteen US soldiers and wounded thirty others. The FBI knew about this and did little with it.
The NSA and FBI have no problem, however, collecting and indefinitely storing the metadata of every law-abiding American citizen’s cell phone calls, text messages, emails, credit card purchases, and web searches, claiming that it prevents terror attacks. These agencies were spying on Americans when the Tsarnaev brothers were planning their attack, but the brothers’ actions didn’t draw the attention of the FBI or NSA. The warning light was blinking red, but the watchmen were asleep at the switch.
Rather than inconvenience American citizens, the Boston Police Department should inconvenience the FBI and NSA by insisting that they do a better job of data collection, analysis, and information sharing. And, yes, they should profile terror suspects instead of spying on or suspecting every American of terror involvement.
Our only hope against terror is to stop taking it out on the American people after an attack, improve our national intelligence process, and hold people accountable when obvious failure occurs. (This is another thing that has not happened since 9/11—no one is held accountable.) Quality warning intelligence is a better model to more successfully detect, deter, disrupt, and mitigate terror attacks. It is a less costly approach not just in budgetary terms, but in safeguarding constitutional freedoms. We deserve privacy and security.
God forbid that a terror suspect straps explosives to his or her body and detonates them in a public space. The overreaction might be that the government makes every American citizen walk naked in public spaces to prevent the next attack.
5. Keep Terror-Related Criminals from Other Prisoners. Did you know that we are inadvertently creating a Petri dish of terrorism right here on American soil?
Holding terrorists in prisons gives them opportunities to convert others to their radical cause. Our prisons have become a terrorist recruiting network right under our noses. Instead, we should isolate terrorists from the general prison population to eliminate their access to a captive audience whom they can convert to their deathly cause. I’d ship these terrorists to Gitmo or create a different prison for them specifically. We must not allow them to try to radicalize our prisoners.
6. Have the Guts to Name the Enemy. Did you notice anything interesting about the assailants in these cases?
After all of these failures, the government refuses to address the elephant in the room—jihadism. In the case of the Fort Hood shooting, eyewitnesses say Hasan screamed, “Allahu Akbar!” as he shot the innocent. It means “God is great” and is the frequent cry of Islamic terrorists as they attack. (Some witnesses weren’t familiar with this phrase, so they reproduced his words phonetically to investigators.) Would you believe that the official US Army report failed to mention Islam,14 even though Hasan made his jihadist, religious motivations perfectly clear?
In the Pulse incident, a Muslim walked into a gay bar and mercilessly murdered forty-nine men and women. In the middle of his killing spree, he took a break to call 911 and a local television station to make sure everyone knew he’d pledged allegiance to ISIS. He also told cops that the Boston Tsarnaev brothers were his “homeboys.” He allegedly took an online course with a radical, antigay imam. Yet somehow this incident was played out in the media in a way that put Christians in the crosshairs. CNN’s Anderson Cooper notoriously interviewed Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had expressed sympathy for the victims. In a remarkable display of willful ignorance, Cooper accused her of hypocrisy. After all, how could a person who opposed same-sex marriage also care if gay people are murdered in cold blood?
(Hey, Anderson Cooper, would you have asked President Obama the same thing had this slaughter occurred before Obama changed his stance on same-sex marriage? Or Mrs. Bill Clinton, who opposed gay marriage until five years ago? Doubtful. It staggers the mind that you had the gall to ask the question.)
American media and our political leaders are being purposefully obtuse when it comes to the topic of jihadism. We have to stop blaming each other and look squarely into the eyes of the enemy.
7. Do something meaningful. Contrary to countries like Great Britain, Russia, and Israel, where terrorism efforts are focused on monitoring without the burden of seeking a prosecution, the FBI continues to drop future terrorists from its radar screen at a time when we need to be more vigilant, not less. Outcry by the American people about such incidents falls on deaf ears. Accountability is nowhere to be found. A better approach is to create an agency solely dedicated to domestic intelligence—reducing the purview of the FBI and transferring these resources to an organization similar to MI5 in the United Kingdom.
It wouldn’t be just another agency. We need to change the culture and mind-set of the FBI, and this culture change has to be made on the fly. ISIS will not give us a time-out to get our act together. Doing this will be tough since these agents have been trained to get evidence, establish probable cause, and prepare for an investigation. That’s not intelligence work.
I met a twenty-year-old American citizen, who came from Pakistan, working at the Apple store.
“I applied for the Milwaukee Police Department,” he told me as we stood next to rows of shiny new iPads. “I wanted to get into information technology, but they told me I had to start off being a beat cop and going through the police academy.”
Eventually, he gave up and started working for Apple.
I looked at that eager-to-serve guy—a man with technology skills, who speaks two Arabic languages and knows the Pakistani culture and customs—and I thought, I’d hire that guy in a second to do intelligence work.
He didn’t want to be a beat cop. He wanted to offer his analytical skills. And we should’ve let him do just that. After all, intelligence analysts ask these three questions:
1. Is this person a threat?
2. Does he have the means?
3. Is he planning an attack?
The guy in the Apple store didn’t need a gun, arrest powers, or training about how to handcuff an arrestee to analyze that data. Our intelligence analysts should follow potential terrorists and never give up the observation until they’re dead. He could have monitored credit card purchases, travel, and communication of potential terrorists. Even if one person on the watch list is quiet for six months, our analysts should know if he suddenly takes a flight to Yemen or Afghanistan. That behavior needs to trigger action so that our intelligence counterparts there can track him and keep an eye on him when he arrives and when he returns.
The FBI is still in a pre-9/11 mind-set in which the targets of an investigation are easily identified and arrest powers come in handy. In the United Kingdom’s MI5 agency, analysts are not tasked with making arrests so they’re focused on intelligence. The guy at the Apple store could’ve easily filled in a vitally important role, but our blinders prevented us from seeing his value.
No, we don’t need another federal agency. We need a new mindset that would approach terror in a way suited to the primary goal not of prosecution but of pre-emption and would reflect the new reality of our world, which is that terrorism is no longer only happening in a distant land. Instead, Americans, if not our bureaucrats, realize that the war has been brought to our soil, and it’s time to stop being sitting ducks.
As a law enforcement administrator, I understand the complexities this type of effort requires. An independent entity, which reports directly to the White House, is the answer for both accountability and reliability.
We’ve done nothing to address the inadequate domestic intelligence functionality within our borders. This reprehensible lack of action requires a sober and forthright national conversation about the deficiencies that have allowed our flags to seem to fly perpetually at half-mast.
We require the proper organization and organizing mission that focus instead on identifying potential threats, establishing their capabilities, determining whether an attack is being planned, and alerting decision makers.
This organization does not exist in our country yet, but it needs to and soon. A new entity focused on protection, not prosecution, is the only way to protect Americans.
We live in a new era. Like it or not, the enemy is at war with us and has come to our home soil. This isn’t the time to plant rose bushes and go about our daily lives. It’s time to assess, adjust our protocol, and stand up for American lives.
President Obama has offered a pathetic, weak, and un-American solution: learn to live with it. Capitulating to hate and murderers is not acceptable to me, nor should it be to any American. It’s up to the American people to demand that a new domestic security entity take up the protection of the homeland.
13
The TSA Is Whistling Past the Graveyard
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, I can’t have more to drink?” a man called out drunkenly to a flight attendant on my way to New Hampshire. I’d hoped to use the two hours to my connecting flight in Charlotte to work on my iPad or possibly get some rest. But thirty-six-year-old Preston Bluntson had other plans for the passengers.1 “I already paid for one,” he said, apparently too inebriated to know that he had not paid for one.
That’s the G-rated version of what he said because every sentence involved throwing F-bombs and other four-letter words. I kept my eyes on him as he switched seats and continued to hurl expletives around the cabin. He was acting as though the airplane was his private jet. The other passengers seemed intimidated by the man’s obnoxious behavior, but I had no handcuffs to secure him if he got so out of hand that early into the flight he needed to be restrained. I didn’t want to be grappling with this guy for the entire two-hour flight. Instead, I planned and waited until the perfect moment before making a move.
In one exchange with the flight attendant he was so belligerent that I had to leave my seat to intervene. “Are you okay?” I asked the flight attendant. He indicated that my intervening should be enough to settle him down. I turned to Bluntson. He wanted another drink.
“You need to chill out. It’s not worth it.”
He stopped, sensing I wasn’t playing around. I returned to my seat, but his restraint didn’t last long. I motioned to the flight attendant to come back to me, and I asked that the airport be radioed so Charlotte police officers could meet me at the gate. I watched the flight attendant pick up the phone and talk. I’m sure it’s requi
red for the attendant to notify the flight deck when a problem arises in the cabin.
As soon as the wheels touched down with the plane still moving fast on the runway, the goof immediately got out of his seat and stood up. The flight attendant told him to return to his seat, but he continued to be loud and profane.
While the plane taxied to the gate, he started taunting me. “Hey, everyone, that’s Sheriff Clarke over there,” he yelled. He looked back at me and said, “What are you going to do about it?” Again, his statements were peppered with more four-letter words. “What is he going to do about it?”
When he refused to sit down, I quickly got out of my seat, walked toward Bluntson, and ordered him to sit down. I was loaded for bear. Every passenger and the flight attendant had to put up with his actions for two hours. Now it was our turn to show him how we felt about it. When he refused to take my directive, I shoved him facedown, pinned him across two seats, and used my weight to hold him in that position with one arm behind his back.
“Stay there,” I commanded. “Stop resisting. If you don’t, things will not turn out well for you.”
“Oh, you’re one of those kind of n—.” He continued to struggle, but he wasn’t getting up from the position I had him in. If he had, I was willing to apply a higher level of physical force. He wasn’t going anywhere.
I held him there and looked around the cabin while he ranted about my supporting Donald Trump. Could this have been a distraction for something more troublesome than a stupid drunk? I looked up and down the aisle of the plane. Nothing looked suspicious other than that I was physically restraining this goof. Not a passenger moved.
I held him until we arrived safely at our terminal. A uniformed officer boarded the plane, and the flight attendant conveyed information.
