Denmark, being a small country , might not be able to or have the balls to fight terrorists with armed citizens, We’ve seen that Isreal HAS and KNOW that the US CAN and WILL!
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55662-2001Oct1?language=printer

For Many Without Guns, Attack Was a Call to Arm

By Yuki Noguchi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 2, 2001; Page E01

Marco Andrei is a bookish chemical engineer and middle-aged father who’d
thought of purchasing a firearm from time to time but never acted on it — until
the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

“This was sort of the last straw,” Andrei said, leading he and his wife,
Christine, to buy a revolver they plan to have loaded ready at their Fairfax home. Right after the attacks, they also joined the National Rifle Association.

Fear of suspected terrorists living in their communities and the threat
of more attacks caused a surge in gun sales in the days after Sept. 11,
according to gun dealers and law enforcement statistics. Many of the
buyers, dealers and experts say, are buying firearms for the first time.

Applications to buy handguns in Maryland more than doubled during the
week of the attacks. The Virginia State Police, which conducts background
checks on those who seek to buy handguns, rifles and shotguns, said the
checks were up 32 percent the week of the attacks. The sale of handguns is essentially banned in the District, and sales of rifles and shotguns are highly restricted.

Nationally, the FBI, which conducts instant background checks on
firearms sales in 25 states, said the number of applications increased 15
percent above normal from Sept. 11 to Sept. 13.

The FBI and state authorities said the sales are returning to normal.
But Blue Ridge Arsenal in Chantilly and other area gun shops, at least
on Saturday, were bustling with new customers.

A shipment of handguns, rifles and shotguns the previous Saturday has
sold out at Blue Ridge, and business is so brisk that Hayward Long, the owner, hasn’t had time to unpack the new shipments. Sales at Blue Ridge, Gilbert’s Small Arms Range and other arms dealers in the area have gone up 50 percent to 75 percent since the attacks, by the owners’ estimates.

“Most of the rush has been new buyers who’ve never owned before and
always thought it was safe living in an area like this,” said Ernie Lyles, who has owned Gilbert’s Small Arms in Fairfax County for 17 years.

One such customer was Tara Stanford, a 29-year-old Web developer and
mother of a 4-year-old son, who’d never fired a gun until last week.

“I’ve always been against unreasonable things like automatic Uzis,”
Stanford said. But the attacks — and a recent attempt to break into her first-floor apartment — accelerated her decision to purchase a handgun.

“You don’t know what’s next, so you have to plan ahead,” said Stanford,
who lives in Falls Church. “It’s not to be taken lightly, but when you weigh that against keeping your family safe, you have to,” she said.

At Gilbert’s Small Arms, new users have filled up shooting classes,
which are now booked through mid-November. For the past two weeks, people have been waiting in longer-than-normal lines to practice at the shooting range, where some shooters are pumping bullets into targets bearing Osama bin Laden’s image.

Lyles even had to restrict the amount of ammunition each customer can buy because of limited supply.

Kathy Molchan, a researcher at the 10,000-member National Association of
Federally Licensed Firearms Dealers in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., has talked to 200 of
the association’s members since the attacks. All reported a spike in gun and ammunition sales. “The vast majority are new buyers who’d never purchased
firearms before,” Molchan said.

These new gun owners talk about fearing any number of catastrophes: a
state of anarchy brought on by a big power outage, air raids or chemical warfare,
gun-store owners say.

The urge to create physical security following a traumatic event is
“entirely understandable,” said Alan J. Lipman, a clinical psychologist and
executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Study of Violence.

“It’s very clear that whomever was trying to do this was trying to
strike at the U.S. and the sense of security we feel,” Lipman said. And in the aftermath, people are struggling with the ambiguity of not knowing whether, when or how terrorism will express itself again, he said.

There is also a sense that we have enemies in our midst: There are still
terrorists at large — within the United States and around the world — which contributes to the insecurity, he said.

“Terrorist attacks have very magnified effects in people, because it
gets them thinking about all the terrible things that could happen,” said Richard Mollica, a Harvard University psychiatrist. People get especially nervous about events of this scale because they feel the government, to whom they look to for protection, was itself proved vulnerable, he said.

Such fear motivated Tom, a Fairfax resident, to purchase a 9mm
semiautomatic handgun and bring his wife, Trinh, and 14-year-old daughter, T.K., to Blue Ridge on Saturday for shooting practice.

“I bought it the weekend following the terrorist attacks out of a fear
of a breakdown in society,” said Tom, who wished to withhold his last name.

“I never thought I’d let [my daughter] practice with a gun,” but now it
feels necessary, added his wife.

Gun-control advocates, meanwhile, argue that terrorist acts underscore
the need for gun-safety education and mandatory background checks at gun shows.

Guns “give them a false sense of security,” said Brendan Daly, a
spokesman for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington, citing an incident last month in which a 3-year-old Spotsylvania, Va., boy fatally shot himself with a handgun his father bought to protect his family after the terrorist attacks. Guns kept in homes are far more likely to be used in an unintentional shooting or suicide, according to Daly.

At times like this, though, Patrick Rio said he wants to feel prepared.

Rio, 26, a customer at Atlantic Guns Inc. in Silver Spring, is mulling
over the purchase of a handgun or rifle for personal protection. Disasters such as those of Sept. 11 “make you think a little bit about whether you’d be prepared,” said Rio, an engineer who lives in Fairfax City.

Stephen Schneider, who owns Atlantic Guns, has seen his share of
first-time customers such as Rio since Sept. 11. “It heightens people’s awareness that we are individually responsible for the safety and security of our own homes,” he said.