Can a city awash in guns, grenades and explosives ever be safe?

[unhappycamper]

Can a city awash in guns, grenades and explosives ever be safe?
By Warren P. Strobel and Mohammed Al Dulaimy, McClatchy Newspapers
Stars and Stripes online edition, Sunday, January 3, 2010

BAGHDAD — A sedan crawled through the choked, noisy streets of Baghdad and approached one of the city's ubiquitous vehicle checkpoints, no different from thousands of other cars — except for the plastic explosives hidden in its body.

This driver, however, was hoping that his lethal cargo would be found. Dressed as an ordinary civilian, he wasn't a suicide bomber, but an employee of Iraq's Interior Ministry who'd been sent out with the explosives — but no detonator — to test the city's defenses.

"I gave strict orders to soldiers to not let any car pass without being searched ... because our commander has a faux car bomb, and if it passes through a checkpoint, officers and soldiers will be detained," said an Iraqi army major who asked not to be named because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue. "Two checkpoint members were imprisoned in the last two months because of the faux car bomb."

Faux car bombs are just one of the efforts that the Iraqi government, with U.S. help, is making to protect Baghdad, a city of roughly 6 million. There are nearly 1,500 fixed and mobile checkpoints; blast walls; controversial hand-held explosive detectors; and armed security personnel on virtually every corner.

But the efforts aren't working, at least not well enough, and stopping every attack in a country that's awash in guns, grenades and explosives is next to impossible.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=67001

[madrchsod]

1. for a minute i thought the article was about major cities in the usa....

no city can be safe with this level of weapons

[cliffordu]

2. lol.

[TheWraith]

3. Funny, but it's not the level of weapons that make a city unsafe.

Ask Switzerland, where they literally store 660,000 machine guns in people's houses as part of their military readiness. The intent of the people with the guns matters.