Europe has seen this nightmare before. On 21 August 2015, a gunman armed with an AK-47-style assault rifle, a pistol and a knife opened fire on a Thalys train travelling from Amsterdam to Paris, wounding three passengers before being overpowered near Arras. The attacker, Ayoub El Khazzani, a 25-year-old Moroccan who had trained with Islamist militants in Syria, boarded the train intending to commit a massacre in the name of jihad. He was stopped only because three off-duty American servicemen happened to be on board and tackled him as he tried to reload. Without them, the carriage would have become a slaughterhouse. El Khazzani was sentenced to life by a French court in 2020. The lesson then, as now, is that a confined train is a soft target and, once the doors close, there is nowhere to r

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