Sometimes, one gets to wonder what the outcome of these attacks would’ve been had our civilian population been trained in some ways to act in the face of such adversity.
While I am dwelling solely in the realm of the hypothetical, it seems like the right time to be asking such questions. Would it have been possible to apprehend the attackers and prevent them from doing further damage if we’d been trained to respond to such situations? Would they have thought twice about opening fire when they’d have known that their chances of success would be thwarted by some of our actions?
It is in such circumstances that the whole funda of reserve duty, as put forth by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) seems to make so much sense.
If there is some way of ensuring that all able-bodied Indian men (and willing women) undergo some sort of training, either at the city or the community level, and have some sort of law or amendment to ensure that this becomes mandatory, we’d have alert citizens who’d be able to respond to occurences of such incidents in the future.
Additionally, it would also increase our reserve strength (or bench-strength in TechSpeak), to be called upon as and when required.
