The " Copycat " Syndrome !

The western world was forced to install street bollards to stop vehicles being deliberately used to run down pedestrians when this became part of the Islamic State playbook.  The massacre of crowds watching a music festival in Las Vegas had nothing to do with IS but you can be sure that they will welcome the scenario because of the scale of suffering it delivered.

Stephen Paddock was a wealthy sixty-four year old retiree who was addicted to gambling.  There are no obvious signs of mental disability and he seems to have been living a normally comfortable life. He had a livein girlfriend, who he sent on a holiday to the Philippines as he put this massacre into motion and it now seems like Las Vegas was just one of the venues that he investigated.

It was a dastardly clever plot,  He amassed over twenty assault rifles and converted most to fully automatic fire.  He booked a room on the thirty-second floor of a Los Vegas hotel with a view of where an open air music festival would be playing across the street.  He setup surveillance cameras to screen the approach to his room and then broke the window and commenced to direct automatic fire onto the twenty-thousand people gathered below.

For eleven minutes he was undisturbed as he either used a fresh assault rifle or slapped a new magazine into others and that unrelenting fire  killed fifty-eight people and wounded five hundred more. He then killed himself as a police SWAT team began to break in to his room.   We do not know what reason drove him to that act of insanity, but it seems unlikely that it had anything to do with religion or was in support of Islamic Sate.

Obtaining even one assault rifle will be more difficult in Australia, but there is a very active arms smuggling operation in place here and we will need to be cautious whenever any event involving mass crowds is planned.  Just as the use of vehicles to deliver mayhem quickly became an item in terrorists minds, the lesson learned in Los Vegas will not be missed by those urging converts to kill and maim in the name of Islam.

For a long time IS was occupied with establishing a Caliphate and capturing territory in Syria and Iraq.  That war is now a lost cause and they are being forced out of their last few strongholds.  To remain relevant, they need to show that they are active and consequently we can expect an increase in terrorist acts in the western world.

Legislation has just been enacted to allow the holding of terrorism suspects in police custody for fourteen days without charges being laid.  Some people claim that this offends our view on civil liberties, but getting killed in terrorist assaults is an even greater infringement on our right to remain alive.

Some people are aghast that this legislation will allow children as young as ten to be scooped up in this detention order.  It must be remembered that IS deliberately targets such young minds and that under Australian law ten is the age of criminal responsibility.  Children in an IS family are likely to be indoctrinated and if we get to them early enough there is a chance they can go on to lead a normal life.

We do not know what possessed Stephen Paddock to commit mass murder in Las Vegas, but he pioneered a new act of terrorism which will attract the " copycat " syndrome.   Unfortunately, the necessity to apply counter measures does contain some elements that restrict our usual application of civil liberties.   That is a safety measure that is necessary.