Preparing for a Mumbai style attack

Telegraph:

The main points raised were that the Government needed to: better arm the police; improve border detection; and strengthen hotels.

In Mumbai, gunmen armed with AK-47 assault rifles and backpacks loaded with ammunition and grenades arrived by dinghy and spread out to the city's railway station, a cafe and the Oberoi Trident and Taj Mahal hotels, where they barricaded themselves into a siege situation.

As local special forces took several hours to arrive, virtually the entirety of the initial fightback was left to police officers armed with bolt-action rifles.

Most of the hostages who were taken in the Mumbai attacks died within 30 minutes of capture.

In the wake of the attacks, Scotland Yard's Assistant Commissioner John Yates said officers needed a boost to their firepower.

It was suggested that British police could even be armed with fully automatic Heckler & Koch assault rifles and Minimi machine guns, as used by the SAS and Royal Marines, as well as more powerful ammunition, such as the controversial hollowpoint bullets, which mushroom on impact and cause much greater internal damage to targets.

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The US would be better prepared for such attacks because the police are better armed. Their is another reason the terrorist would be in trouble in parts of the US like Texas which has a concealed carry law where civilian "targets" could actually shoot back at the attackers without waiting for the police to show up. The terrorist would not face that threat in Europe and especially the UK which banned handgun ownership, much less concealed carry. They have made all their civilians potential victims of a Mumbai style attack.