Newest Chicago Tribune piece: "Take a gun to the mall"

My newest piece at the Chicago Tribune starts this way:

Over the weekend Somali terrorists threatened to attack the Mall of America in Minnesota. They called for a massacre similar to the 2013 Westgate shopping mall attack in Nairobi, Kenya, that killed and injured scores of people. With the large Somali population in the Twin Cities area, the threat is hard to ignore. 

On Sunday, when asked a couple of times if Americans should still go to the mall, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson would only say: "I'm not telling people to not go to the mall."
Unfortunately, Americans have learned little from terrorist attacks like this. Mall of America officials think that by posting signs banning permitted concealed handguns that they are making the mall safer. They seem to believe that terrorists will obey these signs. 

Right after the Kenya attack, Ronald Noble, the secretary-general of Interpol, which is a world version of the FBI and headquartered in Lyon, France, noted two means of protecting people from mass shootings. "One is to say we want an armed citizenry; you can see the reason for that. Another is to say the enclaves (should be) so secure that in order to get into the soft target, you're going to have to pass through extraordinary security."

But Noble warned that his experience taught him that it was virtually impossible to stop killers from getting weapons and that "you can't have armed police forces everywhere." 

"It makes citizens question their views on gun control," he noted. "You have to ask yourself, 'Is an armed citizenry more necessary now than it was in the past, with an evolving threat of terrorism?'" . . .

The rest of the piece is available here (sign-in required, but no fee is required).