Man arrested after he was accused of trying to buy hand grenades for an attack on Times Square.

A police officer at Times Square, New York City. The Hill.

A man has been arrested after being accused of trying to buy hand grenades for a terror attack on Times Square in New York City. The Hill. Police became aware of his plot and set up a sting operation as he went to buy the grenades. The man's name, nationality and motives have not been released but police believe he is a "lone wolf" attacker and not part of a larger plot. 

My Comment:

Just a quick post about this story. As I have said many times before, thank God for stupid terrorists. The man's plan wasn't a bad one, throwing a bunch of grenades around Times Square would cause quite a bit of chaos and could kill many people. But the way he went about getting his weapons was just idiocy. Unlike Sweden, hand grenades are almost unheard of in civilian hands and are generally not available to the general public to the point of almost complete unavailability. About the only people that would sell you active grenades would be police of federal agents looking to make an easy arrest. 

And I'm almost certain that is what happened here. My guess is that he was ranting and raving on the internet or in person and someone ratted him out to the police. An undercover officer likely posed as an arms dealer and that was enough to arrest the guy. This probably means that the public wasn't in too much danger but it's good that this guy is off of the streets. 

It's fortunate that this attacker didn't choose a more conventional form of attack. If he was willing to throw hand grenades at a bunch of people he was certainly capable of ramming them with a car or use any of the other various techniques for murdering a large number of people that don't need to be discussed here. He didn't and New York avoided a major terror attack. 

Police are being coy about this man's motives and who he is, which leads me to suspect that he's probably and Islamic inspired terrorists. The use of "lone wolf" to describe that is also circumstantial evidence that this may be related to ISIS or other extremist terror groups. Time will tell if my suspicions are correct, it's certainly possible that this was unrelated to Islamic terrorism. 

As far as terror plots go, this was a fairly minor one, but that seems to be the status quo these days, after ISIS was defeated. We really haven't had a large scale terror attack since the Sri Lanka attacks. To be fair, that one was huge but in the western world it has been pretty quiet. It turns out destroying a massive terrorist army operating with impunity in the Middle East tends to reduce terror attacks.