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Al-Shabaab Video Threat Means Heightened Security at Mall of America
Reuters and other news outlets carry the news that the Minnesota's gigantic Mall of America is under heightened security after a video threat posted online by terrorist group Al-Shabaab. Also at CNN and CBS News. According to Reuters' version of the story: The U.S. homeland security chief said on Sunday he takes seriously a threat made by Somali-based Islamist militants against shopping malls, including the Mall of America in Minnesota, and urged people going there to be careful.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was reacting to a video released by al Shabaab appearing to call for attacks on Western shopping areas, specifically mentioning Mall of America, the West Edmonton Mall in Canada and London's Oxford Street. ... Mall officials issued a statement about the threat made by the group, saying they are monitoring events with the help of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.
"Mall of America has implemented extra security precautions, some may be noticeable to guests, and others won’t be," the officials said.
They were not given good discounts .. They should shop at wall mart ..
Of one of those mall cop Segways newly equipped with ordnance mount points.
impact is what counts, and groups like Shabaab understand that even if they are incapable of rendering an attack, its the threat that counts most. Commercial targets instituting checkpoints and screening are what these groups are going for, as these hallmarks serve as a consistent reminder that Shabaabs presence is taken seriously by america as a legitimate threat they cannot proactively reduce or mitigate through normal foreign policy to a level that would permit the american "way of life."
legitimate terrorist attacks have no source, no warnings, are unpredictable and incur large-scale casualties. The boston marathon bombing is an excellent example of a functional implementation of terrorism. One or two of these every 10 years and you dont need funding or training for anything else. just send a tweet or post a youtube, and the target entity will do all the work to ensure your message and intent are expressed.
Good people go to bed earlier.
All delivery vehicle drivers will have to have be fingerprinted and pass federal background checks.
The TSA will be at all entrances doing bag checks.
So the US thinks it can bomb the shit out of civilians (only "collateral damage" in US terms) in many countries and support oppressive regimes without someday getting it back? Think again. When you vote for the bombing criminals, you become a legitimate target.
However, these people help the US government just fine in getting support for the US government to control and repress their own population even more.
These terrorist groups have slowly realized that the the biggest damage is not from bombs or airplanes, it is the self-inflicted damage that results. The DHS apparatus, multiple foreign wars and entanglements, loss of liberties, police militarization, "papieren, bitte" and a collective nervous breakdown are draining away the treasure and economic and social vitality of the USA. This is achieved at no cost beyond posting a video on the internet, and beheading any Americans who are stupid enough to visit them.
This is as asymmetric as warfare can get. You may say things are ok in America, but in reality it could have been much, much better..
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I've seen a joke, maybe on a t-shirt, along the lines of "Every day a vegan skips meat, I'll eat three extra burgers." It's interesting because it exposes the question of whether the vegan is really trying to minimize animal deaths, or just seeks personal sanctity.
I wonder if a similar thing could be made with a Koran-burning machine. The machine is configured so that every time the internet has a new message from Islamicists, the machine automatically dips a Koran in pig blood, burns it, posts the video on YouTube, and sends a Tweet giving credit to the Islamicists who triggered that action.
Show me that they get disproportionately attacked by terrorists and I'll take you seriously.
Somehow I doubt having overconfident civilians in a chaotic situation with guns will help anything. Surprise is a key element of terrorism, and well-intentioned people with guns may not have the opportunity to respond when something bad does happen. You're more likely to get injured civilians shot in the crossfire from friendly fire or just poor aim. Heck, it's hard enough getting police to use/refrain-from-using firearms appropriately in crowded areas.
There was the gun free chocolate shop in gun free Australia attacked by one terrorist who didn't seem to have much trouble getting guns in gun free Australia. The elite Australian police took 16 hours to rescue the unarmed hostages - one doesn't simply rush into these things with overtime pay at stake.
Quite frankly, you are the one who can't be taken seriously.
Meanwhile, President Obama and the State Department are trying to bring Syrian refugees into the US. Some US lawmakers and government officials are concerned that members of ISIS might slip into the US, along with genuine refugees. For example,
"You have to have information to vet,” FBI Assistant Director Michael Steinbach, said in a Feb. 11 House homeland security hearing. “Databases don't [have] the information on those individuals, and that's the concern.”
I'm not asking the question whether armed civilians thwart crime generally; that's a different debate with evidence posited on both sides.
I'm wondering if the people who might plan an attack similar to the one at the Kenyan mall or the hotel in India and consider such an assault in the US take into consideration any risks associated with armed Americans, either carry permit holders or even those who carry illegally.
There's the risk of the assault being cut short or otherwise failing because the attackers themselves come under fire from armed civilians as well as the potential publicity failure of "armed citizens kill terrorists, stop attack" type headlines which would potentially demonstrate that against American citizens, terrorists are weaker than Americans.
I would suspect that such risks would be downplayed -- a terrorist event could be considered a "success" just from emptying an AK magazine into a crowd at a mall, even if the attacker(s) were killed immediately after opening fire. Plus there may be the belief that at best they would be up against unskilled persons who were outgunned (handguns versus rifles).
We are living in Brazil.
The movie is dated but poignant. I recommend it to everyone over the age of 12.
I wonder why it hasn't happened already. Despite the panopticon and run of the mill police misbehavior, America still seems like a place where you can move around pretty freely without many obstacles.
Obtaining weapons isn't hard and I doubt there is a terror group out there worth their jihad who wouldn't also know how to convert a semi-automatic-only assault rifle into full auto capable fire, either via either illegal trigger group replacement or modification.
Crowd events are frequent and places like malls are often crowded, providing ample targets for assaults on civilians. Many significant industrial sites like oil refineries or power plants aren't well guarded (nuclear plants may be an exception) and even if a handful of key infrastructures like bridges and tunnels are well guarded, many aren't.
It just doesn't seem like there would be many barriers, require that much skill or planning to do what they have threatened. In terms of terror, the payoff seems immense.
So why hasn't it happened? Is the panopticon that good? Are they just burying all the stories of thwarted attempts?
How about removing that rule as a first step? 'Gun free zones' are instant targets.
You might possibly have had a point if we were considering an armed robbery of the mall, although the fact that countries with strict gun control laws have murder rates that are a tiny fraction of the US suggests that the downsides far, far outweigh any small benefit.
However I really don't understand how a civilian armed with a gun will stop a terrorist bomb. Having armed civilians wandering around a shopping mall shooting anyone with a backpack, bag or briefcase who looks "suspicious" frankly sounds like a far more terrifying prospect than a terrorist with a bomb and one likely to result in far more deaths. What we need is a plan to stop them from causing "terror", not one where you do it for them
Even the own article you mentions
"This chart does not use the very latest data due to differences in how intentional homicide is defined and calculated for each country."
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#By_country
When you pull out the wars it drops
Made me think of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I was here when they evacuated. Hope it's not related.
http://m.19actionnews.com/19actionnews/db_330498/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=o8DTK7dm
The Westgate mall attack wasn't a bomb. It was armed gunmen, and 67 people ended up dead with over 175 wounded.
The parts of the US with the highest murder rates are also the parts with the strictest gun ownership laws. It's almost as if the entire situation is much more complicated than you make it out to be and depends on more than one variable.
Why are you limiting it to just terrorist attacks?
At last check, with the exception of the Gabrielle Giffords's shooting... every single mass shooting in this country since the 1950's where there have been more than 3 deaths have taken place at a location where people were not able to carry a firearm.
This applies not only to every single school K-12 shooting you can think of, but the Aurora theater prohibited firearms on their premises, Ft Hood only allowed MPs to consistently be armed, Virginia Tech prohibited students (even with CPLs) from carrying... the list goes on and on.
Let me turn that Q around for you... when in the history of a world has a person hell-bent on doing evil, walked up to a door that said "Gun Free Zone" and said "Damn, I guess I'll have to find another place to create carnage?"
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Wouldn't it be useful to see if and how the murder rate in the US is distributed... and see if perhaps in a country of more than 300 million there might be pockets which are the source of a disproportionate murder rate to?
Or do you want to ignore the fact of the low murder rate in easy to legally get a gun Plano, Texas (.4 per 100,000) and the high murder rate in the hard to legally get a gun city of Detroit (54.6 per 100,000)? The numbers are striking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
In fact, oddly enough those places with the highest per-capita murder rates in the US tend to have rather strict gun laws full.
Maybe, it's more than just laws about how easy or hard it is to get a firearm?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
It's almost like America is a country where violence is PG-13, but nudity is NC-17.
Oh wait.
Seriously though, the main problem in America seems to be a culture of glorifying violent actions in one way or another. From the classic examples of how geeks and nerds get treated in school by the 'cool' jocks to the frothing "MY GUN OR MY LIFE!" mentality some people exhibit I can only sit here and quietly shake my head at the world-leading super-power who wants to tell everyone else how to do things.
To be quite honest, I'm not sure who's more scary. The extremists east of me ... or the ones west of me.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Is that you Gecko45?
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
legitimate terrorist attacks have no source, no warnings, are unpredictable and incur large-scale casualties.
There are few things which irritate me more than the geek who thinks he has won his argument by quoting from a dictionary of his own invention or an etiquette guide like Emily Post.
That is what makes "legitimate" the key word here.
In real life, terrorists often telegraph their attacks, make a point of being easily identifiable by their victims. and choose targets both great and small.
Malala: The girl who was shot for going to school
Tiffany rumored to be forming a new flash mob group called "Al-Shama-lama-ding-dong"
For you kids, a "mall" is a place where they have stores. Think amazon.com except you have to drive to it, and they never actually have what you want there. The concept might have been more successful if it wasn't for that last bit.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I hear that such folks exist, but they seem to be as rare as a transsexual US Navy SEAL riding a unicorn at the front of a 4th of July parade. Muslims will not listen to goddamned Methodists from Ohio. They will only listen to other Muslims.
Unless other Muslims take to the streets and condemn these threats and actions from the Islamic State . . . ain't nothing gonna happen!
So, if you are Muslim, will you tolerate these extremists in you Mosque . . . ? As long as that problem isn't solved, the rest of us will live in fear of you.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It's a ruse.
If ISIS really planned to attack the MOA, why would they give the authorities advance notice? Their primary weapon is FEAR, and they want to use FEAR to prevent people going to the MALL to spend money, thus affecting commerce and the economy. Their rallying cry is "death to America". You don't accomplish that by blowing up America one mall at a time. That would never be effective.
The 9-11 attack was not on a tourist location. it was on the WTC, which is a center of commerce. They don't need to blow up the malls, just threaten to and the shoppers will stop coming.
I would call their bluff, and go shopping anyway. Besides, the Mall of America has an amusement park in it.
Targeting a mall for a mass shooting or bombing would cause a big reaction, but if a video surfaces of soccer mom kidnapped and beheaded inside the United States all hell will break loose. 9/11, bombings, mass shootings...those are all terrible but they're a little more abstract psychologically because they affect a group of random people. The idea that a van could pull up next to you while walking the dog on the other hand is something that you might find difficult to stop thinking about. They've tried this in other countries (Australia, I think?), so unless there's some radical shift in sentiment (or existence) among terrorist groups it's only a matter of time.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
I'm going to the Mall today.
I'll be there from about 4pm until about 8.
See you there, bitches.
-Styopa
There aren't enough shishkabob joints in malls, nothing but burgers.
Why are you limiting it to just terrorist attacks?
At last check, with the exception of the Gabrielle Giffords's shooting... every single mass shooting in this country since the 1950's where there have been more than 3 deaths have taken place at a location where people were not able to carry a firearm.
Well at the Gabrielle Gifford shooting, there was a good guy with a gun, and he had enough sense not to use it, because by the time he got there, they had the bad guy under control and a good guy was holding his gun.
I don't see how that good guy scenario is supposed to play out. If the bad guy finds a crowd, he can get off 20 rounds, and kill a large number of people, before the good guy can do anything. So having good guys with guns can limit the damage to 10 victims. Unless the bad guy can get a bigger clip.
So we're supposed to have malls full of handguns and automatic weapons, people taking handguns and automatic weapons into bars and parking lots, shoplifters with handguns and automatic weapons.
Is there anyplace in the world like that, besides Afghanistan?
Having armed civilians wandering around a shopping mall shooting anyone with a backpack, bag or briefcase who looks "suspicious" frankly sounds like a far more terrifying prospect than a terrorist with a bomb and one likely to result in far more deaths.
How do you tell a gang of terrorists from a gang of good guys?
What happens when three or four guys wearing keffeyas and carrying military rifles march into a shopping center? What if they don't wear keffeyas? What if they disguise themselves as good guys by wearing American flag and NRA patches?
I've always said that if I were a terrorist organization, my next move (after 9/11) would be: At 12:30 on Christmas eve, I would sent 50 different martyrs to a mall in each state, with a bomb in a backpack. The martyr would be instructed to go to the food court at 12:30 and detonate at exactly that time. On the news, the stories would pour in from every state in the union - and terror would ensue. People would be afraid to go to shopping malls, and the economy would take a massive beating.
because they would not renew the lease of Famous Dave's BBQ. thus, it's no longer a destination
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Are the dead Americans and dead Germans on the cost or benefit side of that equation?
DHS is walking-down Johnson's earlier accusations of a "Threat" to Mall of America.
However, Johnson is keeping on talking.
Now is says he "hears" Muslims in America telling him they are mad that ISIL/ISIS has "stollen" their "Religion."
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/02/22/homeland-security-chief-muslims-in-u-s-resent-islamic-state-attempting-to-hijack-their-religion/
Maybe those "Muslims" are just voices in Johnson's head; which by the way makes him unfit to serve and must be removed quickly and by force.
Johnson, like Obama, seems not to realize that "Muslim" is a ethnic distinction and Islam is a religion.
Why does Obama have to hire such idiots?
Ipso facto.
An idiot is as an idiot does.
It has both. It also has large shops. Oxford Street has shops in a range of sizes.
Maybe, it's more than just laws about how easy or hard it is to get a firearm?
Undoubtedly it is - historically neither the US nor Europe had strict gun control laws and neither appeared to need them. However given that both now have a problem with violence in society it is undoubtedly the case that gun control limits the damage of that violence. Having strict gun control laws in one region is useless: it is trivially easy to go outside that region, purchase what you want, and return with it with almost zero chance of being caught. It's like a "dry country": everyone there just drives a few kilometres to the county next door to purchase alcohol.
Restrictions on items only work when you implement them throughout a region where there is some border control e.g. at the national level. Once you have this there is a reasonable chance of being caught and/or the expense to avoid detection limits the number of criminal enterprises who can get around the law and so limits supply.
Sorry that should obviously be "dry county"!
Who said anything about automatic weapons?
You already have many malls "full of handguns" all over the country, by the way. Not all of them post "gun free zone" signs, and those signs don't have the force of law in many states in any case, so many people simply ignore them.
I understand the general mindset that leads towards gun control. But given that guns are out there anyway, under the current legal regime, how are "gun free zones" doing anything helpful at all?
A small thought experiment: If we define an operational terrorist as being, on average, one year from carrying out an attack then looking at the number of attacks will tell us how many there are. If terrorists are literally "one in a million" then we would expect one attack per day. At 50 or so one attack per week. How many do we get? Durring 2004-2013: anywhere from 5-24 per year (Global Terrorism Database). About one or two a month, on average. Most of those don't actually kill anyone, like eco-terrorists setting fire to a car dealership. Under two dozen lethal events over a 10 year span, about a dozen mass injury, and two mass fatality. So how many bloodthirsty, lethal, capable terrorists are there here at any one time? A couple dozen maybe? Probably less. In a country of 318 million. The good news is the odds of being killed by a terrorist is astonishingly small. The bad news is that a million-plus names on a watchlist is a REALY big haystack for a very small number of needles.
We now have as many guns as people in the U.S. Anyone who is determined can get a handgun or automatic weapon, legally or illegally. Someone who is intending to commit mass murder in a mall is not going to be deterred by the need to violate the gun laws, with a straw purchaser or otherwise.
The NRA has been saying that the solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. When the bad guy starts shooting up a mall, one of the good guys with a gun in the mall is supposed to stop him.
I'm saying that the NRA's argument won't work. Terrorists can surprise and outgun the good guys with the guns in the mall. If the good guys have handguns, the terrorists will bring automatic military weapons. Since the terrorists have the initiative, by the time the good guys realize what's going on and can respond, the terrorists can kill dozens or hundreds of victims.
So what are the good guys supposed to do? Carry automatic military weapons every time they go to the mall?
Laws will have only a limited effect on preventing a terrorist scenario like that. By saturating the country with guns, the NRA has a fait accompli. Terrorists can now get guns, and there's nothing effective that we can do to stop them. Good guys with guns can't stop them.
So occasional terrorist attacks are the price we pay for the current expansive view of the Second Amendment.
An automatic weapon is generally the one that is capable of firing bursts. Getting a full auto weapon in US legally is possible in some states, but prohibitively expensive (on the order of $15,000K for a Vietnam-era M16), and puts you under ATF scrutiny and on their registry. There was exactly one legal full auto gun used in a crime in the past several decades, and that one was by a cop.
As far as terrorist attacks with firearms go, notice how it happened in France first - a place that's presumably pretty tight on their gun laws. Yet the guys who did it had no trouble sourcing a few full auto AKs (again, something pretty damn hard even in US) and even an RPG.
And I don't think that anyone says that more guns in the hands of citizens is going to solve the problem. But it will reduce the impact compared to what we saw in Kenya, for example. There's a difference between slaughtering unarmed civilians, and getting into a firefight, even when the other side has less effective weapons.
MOA already has had some not-so-typical "security" in place -- they have had license-plate recognition cameras at all entrances and exits for a couple years now. The sleek-looking camera heads with two lenses, one for each lane, are fairly easy to notice as you're driving in, mounted about 12' up on poles or a wall. I've always found that sort of technology completely creepy in actual use. A government building, perhaps... but a mall in Minnesota?
...or are they just trying to glean some more marketing information? We don't know.
How long are the records kept? Why were they installed? Are they sharing information with local police to try to catch people with an outstanding traffic warrant?
I'd guess they'll take this opportunity to install facial recognition cameras in the transit station, so they can build themselves a database on who takes the light rail in from Cedar/Riverside and where they train their eyes while walking around in Camp Shoot Me. We'll be living in fear in no time, just the way we like it!
The Castle that's in the logo of every Disney picture. And then the Fortress of Solitude, and....
mark
I was referring to Wayne LaPierre's statement.
This has been rebutted by people who know far more about guns than I do:
One of the things LaPierre blamed for the killings was the absence of "an active, national database of the mentally ill." Since he didn't take questions at his press conference, nobody was able to ask him who would decide who goes into the database, how they would decide, and whether they would then prevent people in the database from buying guns.
One thing I do know about is the medical evidence.
In fact, psychiatrists (the people who decide who is mentally ill) say that such laws would be useless. There was a debate about that in the Annals of Internal Medicine between a gun-owning doctor and a doctor who wanted to stop people with mental disease from buying guns. The gun-restricting doctor admitted he was wrong. Only a tiny minority of people with mental illness are a danger to anyone else. About 30% of the population over 65 has clinical depression. Does LaPierre want to take the guns away from 30% of the population over 65?
In fact, the NRA has lobbied for laws that let people who were prevented from possessing guns, because they were convicted of violent crimes, appeal and have those convictions set aside again in a rubber-stamp procedure, so they could buy guns again. And several of those people have committed murders as a result. So LaPierre wants to give guns back to murderers to let them murder again.
Unfortunately, as a story in Nature said last year, there is no good evidence on gun violence one way or the other. That's because the NRA lobbied congress to stop the Centers for Disease Control from doing gun-related research. That was in response to a study that found that people who bought guns were more likely to use them to commit suicide than to defend themselves. That study would be impossible today, because of the network of NRA-supported laws that prevent researchers from even getting information about guns.
But in the absence of hard data, most doctors and scientists say that the cause of this level of gun violence is the widespread ownership of guns, and that if there were fewer guns in circulation, there would be fewer gun-related homicides and suicides. They also say it's politically impossible to do anything significant about it in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. So our NRA-protected gun access makes it impossible to stop terrorist attacks in malls. Anyone with basic gun skills can get a quick-firing gun and kill 20 people in a crowd before even a more-skilled gun owner can stop him. And if a group of terrorists plan a coordinated attack, they could kill hundreds. If a concealed-gun owner jumps into the fray, on the average he seems to do more harm than good.
Also, good guys tend not to shoot unless they can get a clear shot, not wanting to hit innocent bystanders. Bad guys in these situations are there to shoot innocent bystanders. (At the Aurora shooting, how were moviegoers with guns supposed to stop the killer? He was next to the screen, and was reported to use some sort of smoke or fog, to be difficult to see. The murderer had a much better view of victims.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
A few miles north of the Mall of America, I like to observe all the small shops when driving on commercial streets. You can have both.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
those signs don't have the force of law in many states in any case, so many people simply ignore them.
I understand the general mindset that leads towards gun control. But given that guns are out there anyway, under the current legal regime, how are "gun free zones" doing anything helpful at all?
Actually, we never answered your (reasonable) question.
If I go into a bar in Texas or Colorado (which I did), I would feel more comfortable knowing that the good law-abiding guys aren't taking their guns inside. I don't even want the good guys to have guns when they get drunk and get into fights.
If I were running the University of Colorado health services department, I would know that a gun owner with a gun is more likely to use it for suicide than for self-defense.
If they want to have a rifle and hunting club, or ROTC, and keep their firearms locked up until they're used under supervision, fine. I've gone hunting myself.
But I know that suicide is a high risk for college students, and the presence of a gun makes a suicide more successful.
I can understand the restrictions on firearms in environments where people are expected to get intoxicated or otherwise get their judgment impaired. Those kinds of restrictions are actually very old policy in most places they exist, dating back to 18th century, and I suspect that when they were enacted, it was very much experience-driven (i.e. that drunken shootouts were not uncommon, prompting such laws).
But everywhere else, your sole argument seems to be, "people are more likely to use it for suicide". Which is extremely dubious, especially in case of places such as malls and the like, since 1) people wouldn't generally go there to commit suicide in any case, 2) even if they did, it doesn't really affect you in any different way compared to witnessing the same thing in the street, and 3) if they really want to do it, they'll just ignore the sign/law.
As far as on-campus carry goes, it's really two unrelated things. One is for people who are basically just visiting the campus (this includes the students who don't permanently reside there) - in that scenario, it's not really different from a mall or any other public place, and it's still not at all clear why it requires a different policy from a busy street just outside it (or, for that matter, a small town 50 miles away). The other is for students residing on campus; but at that point you're talking about restrictions on possession in general, not just carry, and your suicide argument is really about possession as well.
LaPierre is a hysterical moron. It's not worth paying attention to what he has to say, and it's not worth arguing with people who take him seriously, because they lack (or voluntarily surrendered) the ability to reason logically and surrendered themselves to emotions.
I would like to point out, though, that the law prohibiting mentally ill from possessing firearms is already in place. The point that NRA keeps raising is that the checks are done on federal level, while the databases are compiled on state level in a very ad-hoc and inconsistent way. Basically, each state decides what goes on the list and when it gets to the feds. So the effect is that we have a law on the books that is supposedly helpful (I'm not familiar enough with the topic to judge whether it actually is or not, though I suspect it would be with the proper criteria), but the implementation of which is hindered in practice. It stands to reason that either the law needs to be repealed, or it needs to be fixed to do what it's meant to be doing.
Regarding allowing people to buy guns after having convictions - I don't see a problem with this in principle. Rights are rights, and the right to keep and bear arms is there on the list alongside the right to free speech or to privacy and protection against warrantless searches. We don't refuse the latter to criminals after they have served their sentence, why should we refuse the former? (BTW, the right to vote is also one thing that is unfairly denied to such people, and that so many states still do it is a travesty).
The bigger problem there is the justice system that's designed to be punitive in nature rather than corrective or deterrent - we release criminals on the streets knowing full well that they're still sociopathic, and we put people in prison for years for crimes that don't harm anyone, or that they wouldn't repeat anyway because they already understand the error of what they did (and after they spend those years in prison, they often turn into sociopaths). Fix that, so that sociopaths remain isolated so long as they remain a danger to society, and gun rights for felons becomes a non-issue.
As far as terrorist attacks in malls go, it would seem that actual terrorists don't have a problem sourcing weapons for them even in countries where gun laws are fairly tight (like, well, France). In any case, in US, even if you were to make them all illegal overnight, you'd end up with all those millions of guns ending up on the black market, still readily available for those who intend to use them for some nefarious purpose. It would take not years, but literally decades for the circulation to scale down - a time scale that doesn't really mesh with the "here and now" nature of the terrorist threat.
And, of course, terrorist attacks are usually not gun massacres. Explosives were, and remain, a best and most reliable way to wreck havoc on a large number of people at once for maximum shock value. In Nairobi mall attack, it took at least four (almost certainly more, initially they reported closer to a dozen attackers; 4 is how many they have arrested in the aftermath) guys with AKs, engaged for several hours, to kill 67 people. In Moscow metro bombings, it took two women with suicide belts a few seconds to kill 40. Much easier logistics, too - no training necessary for the bombers, and explosives are homemade stuff with nails and scraps of metal for a shrapnel load. Pretty much the only reason for them to use guns is when they want to fight off police (in e.g. hostage scenarios like Beslan, or simply when they want to make a statement of how inept the government forces are by holding them back, like in Nairobi).
I doubt detachable magazine capacity matters. One can always carry more magazines and with practice, changing one is not time consuming. Civilians on the other hand are unlikely to carry lots of magazines so standard capacity magazines matter more for them.
Most spree shooters stop one way or another once armed resistance presents itself. Fortunately such incidents are rare despite what mass media would have us believe but this also means that it is difficult to determine what affect a good guy with a firearm will have versus the effect of law enforcement which is well known. There is an added complication in that if a civilian successfully stops a spree shooter, then there could be no mass shooting in which case they did not stop one. A similar issue crops up measuring DGUs (defensive gun uses) when it only counts if the suspect is shot or killed.
The incident at the Clackamas Town Center comes to mind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
The US also has a proportionally high rate of homicide with knives and blunt objects. How is it that our lack of gun prohibition raised those as well?
One problem with the naive "murder rate" statistic is that different countries have different reporting criteria. Many countries only record a murder after disposition of the accused which artificially lowers their count in comparison to the US where it counts as a homicide no matter who kills them.