Terrorism threat is high across Europe and United States

Having just returned from a 15-day trip across six European countries, I cannot share my experiences without first describing how all of them are dealing with the growing fears that killers will attack their populace.

In every airport, every train station, every tourist destination and every place where large numbers of people gather, it’s the same scene: Heavily armed soldiers bearing true automatic assault weapons are all around.

These are not the rifles that just look like assault weapons that liberal lawmakers want to deny to law-abiding citizens. They are real machine guns carried by military personnel who also have strange packs of other deadly armaments strapped to their waists and over their shoulders.

At the big airport in Milan, Italy, they were more menacing in their appearance than anywhere else I witnessed.

Stationed sometimes as close together as one every 50 feet or so, they held their weapons at their chests with their trigger fingers less than an inch away from the trigger.

Some may read this and react that they are glad things aren’t this bad in our own country. Allow me to correct that impression.

On our way to our first destination in the Netherlands, we had a six-hour layover in Philadelphia. My wife and I used those hours to take our 13-year-old granddaughter to Independence Park.

We wanted to introduce her to the places where our country’s founders declared independence from Great Britain’s reign of tyranny and crafted the most successful form of government in human history.

The park was very crowded. Barricades surrounded the area and blocked most traffic from approaching anywhere closer than two to three blocks from the sacred grounds.

Then moving throughout the park in obvious view to everyone were soldiers of the U.S. Army armed to the teeth. Their presence brought a combination of foreboding and comfort.

We encountered them not only patrolling the open spaces, but there was at least one at the entrance to every building from Independence Hall to the Liberty Bell.

I suppose we felt safer because they were there. Then I wondered if we really were.

If a terrorist showed up wearing a vest loaded with explosives, could they have stopped him or her from detonating it in the crowd?

The only metal detectors were at the entrances to the buildings, not to the park itself.

The obvious point is a killer with designs on sacrificing himself is unlikely to be deterred by soldiers who would potentially accomplish the same objective for him.

My experiences brought a clear reality to the unsafe conditions throughout our country and all across the globe that Donald Trump described in his speech accepting the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.

Yes, the speech that coordinated media across the country described the next day as being “dark.”

People I talked to during my travels seemed to consistently say things weren’t going to change until the “West” got serious about destroying radical terrorists who threaten them.

It doesn’t require a translator to understand that the “West” is, in fact, the most powerful military force on Earth, the United States.

Trump’s approach, regardless of whether you like him or not, offers more than what is currently being done by an administration that has failed to even reduce the threat that faces the world, much less eliminate it.

Call it “dark” if you wish, but a better name would be to recognize it all as reality.

Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, had her chance. More half measures aren’t going to make us safe.

This story was originally published July 29, 2016 at 6:13 PM with the headline "Terrorism threat is high across Europe and United States."