It was Friday evening, and I was listening to a survivor of the Bataclan Theater terrorist attack in Paris describe how it took place.  The attackers wisely seized the high ground, the balconies, where they were able to fire down into the masses of people packed into the overcrowded main floor.  According to this witness, the terrorists were able to continually fire their weapons randomly into their helpless victims for ten to fifteen minutes before the police assault finally took them down.

Listening to that, my first thought was this: what if the members of that audience, who were all unarmed by French law, didn't have to simply wait passively to be random victims?  What if Paris was a city that permitted concealed carry?  In an audience of more than a thousand, perhaps one in twenty might have been packing.  That's more than fifty citizens who could have been returning fire on those terrorists.  Sure, it would be handgun rounds against automatic rifles and possibly shotguns, but trust me, those three shooters wouldn't have been randomly shooting helpless fish in a barrel had they had incoming rounds from that many firing points – even from half that many.  When they were able to raise their heads over the balcony rails, they would have been targeting those citizen shooters instead of killing the helpless...or they might have fled in the face of return fire, as terrorists sometimes do.

The growing body count as of this writing is 120 slaughtered in the Bataclan.  We'll never know how much that body count could have been reduced if the foolish French allowed their citizens to go armed.  Their imprudent gun control laws contributed to unnecessary carnage.

Once again, when seconds counted, the police were just too many minutes away.