Three Americans and a British man credited for stopping a terror attack on French train. NBC News

From left to right, Americans Anthony Sadler, Alek Skartalos and Brit Chris Norman posing with medals they received for bravery. NBC/Reuters.

Three Americans and a British man are credited with stopping a terror attack on a French train. NBC News. The men tackled a 26 year old Moroccan man with connections to radcial Islam after he open fired with a fully automatic AK-47. The Americans were all friends and two of them were in the military. One of them, Spencer Stone, an airman, was seriously injured in the attack, alone with a French American. Neither of the injures are considered life threatening. Stone was injured with a boxcutter after the four men disarmed the man of his AK-47 and handgun. The men beat the terror suspect until he passed out. The four men are being hailed as hero's across the world, with the men all receiving medals for bravery. Another French person had tried to fight with the gunman, but was overpowered. 

My Comment:

Good on these guys. Though the NBC article mostly focused on the American's, I have to say the British one, Chris Norman, had a pretty bad ass attitude about the whole thing. "'OK, I'm probably going to die anyway so let's go.' I'd rather die getting active". That's the right attitude to have in these kinds of situation. 

All four of these men were incredibly brave. Especially Sadler and Norman, who, as far as I can tell, had no military training. Even the Frenchman who fought the terrorist but had to flee after being overpowered was brave. So many people wouldn't try to fight when attacked like this. But these guys did and for that they are hero's. And I have heard from other sources that the men's medical training was also the reason the French-American will survive the shooting.

These kinds of things happen more often then you would think. Many mass shootings end when unarmed people attack the gunman. To say nothing of when they fight back with guns or other weapons. But even unarmed, it may be your best chance of survival to fight back. Especially if the gunman is distracted or is in an enclosed space like this train was. Yes, doing so is dangerous, but fighting is often better then running or hiding, especially if you are fighting with a few other people like these men were. 

Of course, this could have ended a lot worse then it did. It is yet another terror attack in France, which has seen quite a few lately. All of them seem to be connected to radical Islam, either inspired by ISIS or an active operation by Al-Qaeda. France has a large and marginalized Muslim population and many of them are ripe for recruitment. These attacks seem to be popping up with more and more regularity, and I am not sure how France is going to deal with these attacks.

I have to wonder how all these terrorists in France, and other parts of Europe, manage to get fully automatic weapons. The Charlie Hebdo attackers had fully automatic rifles and even an RPG launcher, purchased from an illegal Belgian arms dealer. That's just insane to me since France has fairly strong gun control laws, but they always seem to have attacks with fully automatic military weapons on a fairly regular basis. In America attacks with fully automatic weapons are unheard of, even though our gun control laws are a lot less strict. In America, fully automatic weapons are fairly hard to come by, but in France they are completely banned. So how the hell are these terrorists getting their weapons?

There seems to be a large underground arms trade in Europe that allows these terrorists to get military rifles. It just goes to show that gun control doesn't really work all that well. The average French person has to go through hoops to try and get a gun, but a terrorist can just buy one off the black market and they try to shoot up a train. In this case, four men were able to stop the terrorist, but in other cases, like the Charlie Hebdo attack, people weren't so lucky.