‘France train shooting: Americans overpower gunman on Paris express’

Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos and Briton Chris Norman after the attack on the train.
“The three Americans and Norman have already been awarded medals of bravery from the local mayor. Stone was still in the hospital, so he is not pictured in the Twitter photo above.”

If countries like France won’t allow the concealed carry of firearms, maybe the concealed carry of Americans is the next best way to stop would-be mass shooters.  The Guardian reports:

A heavily armed gunman has opened fire on a high-speed train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris before being overpowered by three US citizens, two of whom were soldiers.

Apparently it started when “the men heard the sound of a gun being loaded behind closed doors in a bathroom on the train.”  Then, The Guardian continues,

“We heard a gunshot and we heard glass breaking behind us and saw a train employee sprint past us down the aisle,” Sadler said. The trio then saw a gunman entering the carriage with an automatic rifle, he added.

“As he was cocking it to shoot it, Alek just yells: ‘Spencer, go!’ and Spencer runs down the aisle,” Sadler said. “Spencer makes first contact, he tackles the guy, Alek wrestles the gun away from him, and the gunman pulls out a box cutter and slices Spencer a few times. And the three of us beat him until he was unconscious.”

Apparently the Islamist tough guy turned out to be kind of a whiner:

Sadler later told AFP the gunman had demanded his weapon back. He said: “He was just telling us to give back his gun. ‘Give me back my gun! Give me back my gun!’ But we just carried on beating him up and immobilised him and that was it.

Two of the Americans are young veterans who have served in Afghanistan, but the third is an example of the courage of ordinary Americans:

“I’m just a college student. I came to see my friends for my first trip to Europe and we stop a terrorist. It’s kind of crazy.”

And, lest we forget the significant role that luck or God plays, apparently things might have gone very differently:

Skarlatos, who had recently returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan with the national guard, told Sky News the gunman’s AK-47 had jammed and that he had not known how to fix it.

“If that guy’s weapon had been functioning properly, I don’t even want to think about how it would have went,” he said. “We just did what we had to do. You either run away or fight. We chose to fight and got lucky and didn’t die.”

. . .

“I just applaud my friends for being on point,” Sadler told Sky News. “If Alek didn’t yell ‘Go!’ and Spencer didn’t get up straight away, who knows how many people he would have shot.”

Apparently

They didn’t know that the man’s gun had stopped working; Stone ran anyway, knowing that it would mean he would be shot if the gun was working.

Honorable mention to the Americans’ British ally:

A British passenger, Chris Norman . . . a 62-year-old consultant who lives in France, sad he had initially ducked down in his seat when he saw the man enter the carriage carrying a gun.

“I came in at the end and I guess just helped get the guy under control at the end of it all,” he told French reporters. “We ended up by tying him up, then during the process the guy actually pulled out a cutter and starting cutting Spencer.

“He cut Spencer behind the neck, he nearly cut his thumb off too. Spencer held him and we eventually got him under control. He went unconscious, I think.”

But Spencer Stone is a soldier!  He did every job:

Some reports say that doctors are going to try to reattach his thumb on Saturday and his eye may also be injured.

Another passenger’s throat was cut and Stone applied pressure to the man’s neck to keep him from bleeding out, despite Stone’s own serious injuries, CNN reported.

As far as I can tell from reports so far, not a single person has died, and only about three people were even injured, including Stone.

The gunman didn’t fire his weapon but wounded one man with a handgun and the other with a blade, said Philippe Lorthiois, an official with the Alliance police union.

The unsurprising dark spot is that the liberal news media are almost cartoonishly reluctant to figure out why the attacker attacked in the first place.  A Muslim young man tried to commit another mass murder of Western civilians, I wonder what his motive could possibly have been?

The suspect’s motive was not immediately known, but French prosecutors said counter-terrorism investigators were launching an inquiry. According to early briefings, the gunman, 26, was known to French intelligence services and was Moroccan or of Moroccan origin.

What were the names of those three Americans again?  I’m glad you asked!

Anthony Sadler, a senior at Sacramento State University, was traveling with childhood friends Spencer Stone, an Air Force serviceman from Carmichael, California, and Alek Skarlatos, a National Guardsmen from Roseburg, Oregon, when they heard a gunshot and breaking glass.