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Italian cruise ship Melody
It was just another shiver me timbers day this past weekend when pirates far off the coast of Somalia attacked the Italian cruise ship Melody and it's 1,500 passengers with automatic weapons. Until that is, the pirates found out that "in the darkness, the crew would fire back. . . . 'It felt like we were in war,' the ship's Italian Commander, Ciro Pinto, told Italian state radio."
But the cruise ship did not fire back with advanced weaponry - no, they just deployed some passengers with handguns to shoot at the pirates along side the crew members wielding water hoses. These are the exact "combined arms" tactics I recommended in my recent column "Let's just give the pirates our ships - bullets first, ARRGH!"
Though in the past shipping lobby spokesmen chanted in unison the mantra that crews should remain disarmed, this view is starting to crack. Africa expert Peter Pham, director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs at James Madison University says that the "pirates' business model, if you will, has been to not cross a line which would bring the whole weight of the world upon them. They want to seize hostages and ransom those hostages. So the likelihood that they would escalate violence is unlikely."
And crack it should - the victim disarmament lobby here at home has lost the battle trying to prove disarmament lowers crime or limit casualties from crime. See generally John R. Lott, Jr., More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws, Second Edition (2000).
American based cruise ships can easily adopt the same tactics as their Italian counterparts by letting crew members and every-day American passengers check or even carry their long guns and handguns as they board ships just in case they are needed to fend off pirates. After all, when minutes count at sea, NATO war ships are only hours away, and even then, often just release pirates anyway.
For more info: OpenCarry.org & DC Gun Rights Examiner
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