No not at all A man has to pick and choose his own beliefs I have real trouble with team play religion man has trouble agreeing with himself imo
American heroes tackle gunman and foil train attack Three friends praised by presidents after they prevent attack on a European train. By ADAM NOSSITER New York Times August 22, 2015 — 6:45pm please log in to view this image Feed Loader Associated Press Airman Spencer Stone, who was injured when he helped subdue the gunman, waved as he left the police station in Arras, France. comment0 share0 tweet0 email Share on LinkedIn Share on Google+ Share on Pinterest Copy shortlink: Purchase:Order Reprint PARIS – It was 5:45 p.m., a normal Friday afternoon on the sleek high-speed train that takes high-level European diplomats, businesspeople, tourists and ordinary citizens between Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris. Less than an hour away from Paris, a French passenger got up from his seat to use the toilets at the back of the carriage. Suddenly, in front of him rose a slightly built man. Across the man’s chest, in a sling, was an automatic rifle of the kind favored by jihadists the world over: an AK-47. The passenger — singled out by French officials for his courage, but not named by them — threw himself on the man. The gun went off, once, twice, several times. Glass shattered. A bullet hit a passenger. The man with the gun kept going down the carriage, holding his AK-47 and a Luger pistol. In a pocket was a sharp blade capable of inflicting grievous harm. The man had at least nine cartridges of ammunition. “I heard a gunshot,” Chris Norman, a British consultant, said at a news conference Saturday. “I heard a window shatter. I saw an employee run down the train. I saw a man holding an AK-47.” Alek Skarlatos, a specialist in the National Guard who was vacationing in Europe with his friend, Airman First Class Spencer Stone, and another American, Anthony Sadler, looked up and saw the gunman. Skarlatos, who was returning from a deployment in Afghanistan, looked over at the powerfully built Stone, a martial arts enthusiast. “Let’s go, go!” he shouted. please log in to view this image <img src="http://metrics.startribune.com/b/ss...unman and foil train attack&channel=Photo Gallery&server=startribune.com&c1=http%3A%2F%2Fstmedia.stimg.co%2Fows_14402869077393.jpg%3Fw%3D263&c2=V20150820&c3=Photo&c4=Photo Gallery&c5=noscript&c7=Photography&c16=&c24=Photo Gallery&c31=Related%20Article%20Single%20Image&c33=" height="1" width="1" border="0" alt="" /> please log in to view this image Left to right, Anthony Sadler, a senior at Sacramento State University; Alek Skarlatos, a National Guardsman from Roseburg, Ore., and Briton Chris Norman — with awards from the Arras mayor. More Stone went after the heavily armed gunman and, with his friends, pounded him to the floor of the train carriage. “I mean, adrenaline mostly just takes over,” Skarlatos said in an interview on Saturday, barely 12 hours after it was all over. “I didn’t realize, or fully comprehend, what was going on.” Their actions saved many lives on the train, which was packed with more than 500 passengers, according to French officials. The attack took place near the historic town of Arras. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve of France identified the suspect Saturday as a 26-year-old Moroccan man known to the Spanish authorities as a member of “the radical Islamist movement.” Cazeneuve said that police had not fully confirmed his identity. By Saturday evening, having left the hospital in Lille where he was operated on after being severely cut by the suspect, Stone and his friends were being hailed as heroes by French officials and citizens. Some were proposing them for the Legion of Honor. President Francois Hollande of France thanked them for “remarkable bravery” and invited them to Élysée Palace for a congratulatory meeting. Call from Obama President Obama called the three Americans “to commend and congratulate them for their courage and quick action,” a spokesman, Eric Schultz, said. And Hollande spoke with Obama by phone, “thanking him warmly” for the “exemplary conduct of the American citizens.” There was no thought of heroism as the men sprang into action, however. “What happened and what we did, it just feels unreal,” Skarlatos said in the interview. “It felt like a dream, or a movie.” In the train carriage, Stone was the first to act, jumping up at the command of Skarlatos. He sprinted through the carriage toward the gunman, running “a good 10 meters to get to the guy,” Skarlatos said. Stone was unarmed; his target was visibly bristling with weapons. With Skarlatos close behind, Stone grabbed the gunman’s neck, stunning him. But the gunman fought back furiously, slashing with his blade, slicing Stone in the neck and hand and nearly severing his thumb. Stone did not let go. The gunman “pulled out a cutter, started cutting Spencer,” Norman told TV interviewers. “He cut Spencer behind the neck. He nearly cut his thumb off.” Skarlatos grabbed the Luger pistol and threw it aside. Incongruously, the gunman yelled at the men to return it, even as Stone was choking him. A conductor grabbed the gunman’s left arm, Norman said. The AK-47 had fallen to the gunman’s feet. Skarlatos picked it up and “started muzzle-thumping him in the head with it,” he said. By then, an alarm had sounded. Jean-Hugues Anglade, a French actor, had broken the glass to set it off, cutting himself in the process. The train began to slow down. Julia Grunberg, a Brazilian student living in the Netherlands, looked up from her book. “It was all very normal,” she said. “Then, suddenly, the alarm started ringing. We were very fast; then we were very slow.” Criticism of train crew Anglade accused the train personnel on Saturday of having fled the scene of the struggle, abandoning the passengers and cowering in the engine car. He told the French media that the behavior of the staff had been “terrible.” Norman and Sadler had joined in the efforts to subdue the gunman, who “put up quite a bit of a fight,” Norman recalled at the news conference in Arras on Saturday. “My thought was, ‘I’m probably going to die anyway, so let’s go.’ Once you start moving, you’re not afraid anymore.” Stone, wounded and bleeding, kept the suspect in a chokehold. “Spencer Stone is a very strong guy,” Norman said. The suspect passed out. Norman bound him up with a tie. Skarlatos, the AK-47 in hand, began to patrol the carriages, looking for other gunmen. He discovered that the suspect’s guns had malfunctioned, and he had not had the competence to fix them. “He had pulled the trigger on the AK. The primer was just faulty, so the gun didn’t go off, luckily,” Skarlatos said. “And he didn’t know how to fix it, which is also very lucky.” In addition, the gunman had not been able to load his own handgun: “There was no magazine in it, so he either dropped it accidentally or didn’t load it properly, so he was only able to get what appeared to be one shot off,” Skarlatos said. Bleeding heavily, Stone went to the aid of a gunshot victim, Sadler said. “Even though he was injured, he went to help the other man who was injured,” he said. “Without his help, he would have died.” All those who took part realized it could have been far worse. “If that guy’s weapon had been functioning properly,” Skarlatos said, “I don’t even want to think about how it would have went.”
Amazing story. I hope I'm wrong but I have an awful feeling that, had this occurred in the UK, the heroes might have been arrested for use of excessive force! Hope I'm wrong.
Unfortunately, you are probably right RTID, but let's hope nothing like this happens, I'd hate to think how the yooman rights brigade would react.
Another joke of an attack by 'terrorists'. These people aren't a serious threat, American schoolkids carry out better attacks. All his weapons malfunctioned? They're so poorly organised I'm starting to believe they're set-ups.
Shot in the throat I think, cared for by one of the Americans who had himself been stabbed in the neck and nearly had a thumb severed. Without wanting to fall into crude national stereotypes, hard to avoid noticing that the people who acted were Yanks and a Brit (pretty sure there were no Germans in the carriage, or they would have been on their feet too) while the train crew locked themselves inside the luggage car.
Yep. The idiot terrorist chose the wrong carriage containing two marines. I really liked the quote from the British guy, who said something like he thought he was going to die anyway and he wasn't going to just sit in a corner and wait to be shot!! Top man!! For all their faults (actual and perceived), the Yanks and the Brits are not people to to be taken lightly.
Were any of the crew even French? In my experience these types of jobs are nearly always taken up by "foreigners" (low paid ones at that). That stereotype about the French is so historically inaccurate anyway as to always be quite funny when I hear it mentioned
no, but I read 'the brethren' by John Grisham about 3 months before 9/11 and have never trusted that attack, far too many coincidences.
