France’s interior minister guaranteed a 20-minute police and military response time to future terror attacks anywhere in France.
“In a crisis our citizens expect faultless collaboration at all times,” minister Bernard Cazeneuve told a news conference.
France’s government was heavily criticized in the wake of the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, where a police response wasn’t ordered for two hours and 40 minutes. Military units close to the music venue did not respond, and the specialist BRI police division didn’t arrive on scene until about 40 minutes after the attack began.
On March 7, Cazeneuve defended the response, saying, “In a context like that, where there are suicide belts and the place may be rigged with explosives, and we don’t know how many terrorists are present or where they are, you can’t intervene until you have the site under control.”
France’s strict gun-control regime means that citizens have no means of effective defense until help finally arrives.
