Just a WAG but if they were unarmed they may have been traffic cops. I’m not aware of Parisian gendarmes being unarmed as a rule.
Oh goodie.
I’m not sure the publication will even continue to exist.
The “National Police” are armed. The “Municipal Police” - that is, local policemen, aren’t.
Cite? French police is armed.
Possibly.
Multiple news sources. Here’s one:
A reporter for Britain’s Telegraph newspaper in Paris told Sky News that the first two officers to arrive, who were apparently unarmed, fled after seeing gunmen armed with automatic weapons and possibly a grenade launcher.
There are trade-offs. This is obviously one of the downsides of unarmed police. But there are also downsides to armed police. I’m not sure which is better, and it may depend on local factors.
Statistically, IIRC, France and Paris are very safe places compared to, say, the US and DC. Maybe the downsides to armed police are worth it here, but they might not be worth it there.
There are at least two police forces in Paris: Municipal, who may or may not carry sidearms (it depends on local city policy), and National, who do carry arms. Occasions where Municipal police might need to discharge a firearm in the course of their duties are frankly very rare (although admittedly it might have made a difference here, if the quoted bit is true).
I have a good friend who lives near the location of the shootings. Guess I’ll be checking in on her.
I only have one precedent about this – in the 1970s the Spanish satirical magazine “El Papus” got their Barcelona headquarters thoroughly bombed by terrorists intent on obliterating it. Yet the magazine survived and kept being published (later it had to fold for economic reasons). That bomb attack did not deter them.
I am convinced that “Charlie Hebdo” will go on and will not change its line. They are many things… One of them is, in my opinion, brave.
There was an editorial meeting going on at the time. With some big names in attendance. That suggests that they had some inside help or at least information.
It sounds like the unarmed Municipal Police are responsible for things like traffic violations, public drunkenness, and the like. The National Police are armed and would be the sort of people you want around in the event of a mass shooting.
<sets watch>
Made me think of the line by medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen, “Only the devil in his envy laughed, for there is no work of God that remained unspoiled.”
And the solution to the mystery in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose:
Substitute “Christianity” for any other fundamentalist belief and it remains true in the eyes of the fundamentalist believer.
Fucking weasely, murdering shits.
This is why more ridicule of their Islam is required. Keep doing it until they realise they are going to have to accept it. That it won’t stop. I like** Morgyn’s** comment
I agree and that should only force us to ridicule them and their beliefs even more because any belief system that compels you to take such actions is a belief system that deserves contempt and ridicule.
Let my taxes be spent on providing whatever protection is needed for these sort of outlets to ply their trade.
ETA: and Gallows Fodder gets it spot on as well.
If that’s all it takes to radicalize Muslims, then they will be radicalized anyway at some point. Someone somewhere will burn a Koran, or make a movie that denigrates the prophet. We can’t stop it, we can’t even make it illegal, and we shouldn’t even try.
In a country where public funding goes to Jesus in a jar of piss, we can do a nude Mohammed and it should be funded by the federal government to boot.
Where are all the inquisitive toddlers when you need them?
Hey wow, fuck off with your your shitty partisanship, mkay? France gets a fraction of the gun deaths we have in the US. If our police and citizens were unarmed, we’d definitely save thousands of lives a year. Unarmed police is one sign that the police aren’t there to kill you, it would do a lot to calm the racial tensions here where every other weeks it seems some black guy is being killed. You’d be safer unarmed, and so would your neighbors
That’s one of the stupidest ideas I"ve every heard. Unless, that is, you want to radicalize the muslims who don’t automatically think the West is aligned against them.
So what would be the alternative?
Oh, it is soooo “partisan” to point out that policemen showed up at the scene, saw armed men and ran away.