Although I’m not originally from Mumbai, it’s a city near and dear to my heart. It’s a grungy megapolis with people who, on the surface, come across as rude, pushy, and loud. Everyone’s scurrying around trying to eke out a living and people don’t have time for niceties. In a 2006 study on politeness, Mumbai was ranked the rudest city in the world (archived). The methodology of that study is justly disputed (archived). What I like about Mumbai, however, is the humanity of its people. When the city is in trouble with its recurrent rain and floods, you see the true nature of its people. Instead of opportunistic looting, you see people throw open their doors to help strangers and even animals. A lot of this is voluntary spontaneous order, done without a government agency like FEMA.

On this day, 16 years ago, this city of mostly decent people was hit with a complex Jihadi terror attack – 10 Islamic terrorists split up into 5 pairs and hit different locations simultaneously. They used grenades and guns and arson. They took the lives of 166 innocent human beings, and caused lifelong injuries in another 300. The families of the dead have open wounds that will never heal.

The Jihadis were drugged up on cocaine and LSD, which, unlike alcohol, are apparently halal and not haram. The attackers paid no heed to man, woman, or child, Indian national or foreign tourist. Their handler – a Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) officer Major Iqbal – instructed them to especially target Jews, telling them that the life of a single Jew was worth 50 times that of a non-Jew, and putting the Mumbai Chabad House on the list of targets.

This attack is often described as India’s 9/11. Because of the date/month/year format in which dates are written, it’s called “26/11” in India. Like how 9/11 caused total chaos and confusion at first, the Mumbai attack overwhelmed emergency services. Imagine working at an emergency call center, and getting swamped with thousands of phone calls within minutes, from different parts of a city of 18 million people (at that time). Throw in rumors and second-hand information, and the chaos was unfathomable.

Intelligence failures aside, what stood out to me in this attack was the malevolent cowardice and incompetence of law enforcement. They froze, ran, and hid. I’ve been very hard on Indian police in my previous writings, including in my book. Indian cops tend to be very corrupt. They kick around and harass ordinary people. If you get arrested for something, it’s a given that you will get a good thrashing from them. If you bribe them, you can get away with crime.

Yes, it was a very brave cop, who sacrificed his life to catch one of the terrorists alive. It was this capture that yielded information pointing back to the same evil regime that hosted Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad. However, a significant number of casualties happened at the Mumbai CST train station, and the armed cops there ran away and left disarmed citizens to the slaughter. An eyewitness photojournalist who took the iconic photograph of one of the terrorists said, “I Wish I’d Had a Gun, Not a Camera.”

Watching video footage of cops running away opened my eyes and I’ve never closed them since. I threw out my prior assumptions on public safety. If armed cops, who are literally present on site as a terrorist attack unfolds, cannot be counted on to fight, what good are they? People are legally compelled to be disarmed based on false promises of safety, and when those promises are broken, all that the public gets is a big, “Oops.”

Over the years, an unmistakable pattern has become visible to an observer. This wasn’t just an Indian brand of incompetence; we’ve seen this globally. At home in the United States, the worst incidents that I can think of are Parkland and Uvalde. 

In Parkland, as in Mumbai, there was an armed cop who was present on site. Like the Mumbai cops, he froze and hid. Uvalde was another national embarrassment. A whopping 400 cops were incompetently kept on standby outside the school, while the slaughter was happening inside.

In the end, I’m happy I had my eyes opened before I got too old. I didn’t just become another gun owner; I’m a firearms instructor and a Second Amendment writer, and deploy my skills to make sure that people can be responsible for their own safety and aren’t put in a position in which they’re dependent on an unreliable State.

I will forever be grateful to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers to bequeath the People with the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights. No other country trusts its people with arms, and in my mind, that means that no other country is truly free. This American freedom is exceptional. Keeping it alive is essential, but it’s not easy. Nothing of value is free. I hope our generation and future generations are willing and able to put in the hard work to keep this freedom alive.