Re: Paris Under Attack....the hell?
So you kill thousands, maybe millions of non-combatants because of where they live?
It sounds more like the propsed strategic plan is something like you
threaten to kill the non-combatants as "co-conspirators" for providing safe haven to the bad actors,
unless they take an active role in ridding their own neighborhoods of the terrorists by providing strategic intelligence, offering safe passage to special-ops, pointing out the terrorists' houses for targeted bomb strikes, etc.
If the threat is credible enough, one hopes that the regular folks would be able to step up in their own defense, not by taking arms (and getting slaughtered by the terrorists instead of us) but by covert resistance. I mean, if you are a civilian forced to deliver food to them under duress against your will, consider lacing it with something, etc.
Just like United Flight 93 may change forever the way airplane passengers respond to hostage situations, it seems to me that the attack on the nightclub should also give people second thoughts on how to react.
How can three people with automatic weapons take 100 people hostage, when,
if those people all charged the terrorists at the same time, they eventually could overwhelm them?
The only reason in the past to refrain from such a "suicidal" action in self-defense would be the hope that the terrorists would keep the hostages alive so that they could use the hostages as negotiating chips. It sounds more like the terrorists now will only hold the hostages long enough to set up the bombs throughout the building (I know that didn't quite happen yesterday, but that's the threat going forward).
The terrorists have now changed the rules of game going forward, and so now ordinary people have to change their responses too: no more hoping they'll let you live if you don't resist, now we know that they will just go through and mow you down one by one. Either die in self-defense acting as a group, or die cringing in fear one by one.
I've advocated universal military training for every US citizen in the past, more to keep us out of wars while teaching people basic personal safety and establishing basic standards for personal fitness; maybe we now need to consider universal public safety training to include how to rush hostage takers en masse right away. They changed the rules, we need to adapt.