A gunman firing from a vehicle killed one person and wounded five others — including a 12-year-old girl shot eight times — in a Paris suburb Friday, and French authorities are investigating the rampage as terrorism. For ordinary Americans watching another European terror attack, the question isn't just what happened in Trappes. It's whether the same leaders who opened the borders will now use the carnage to crack down on their own citizens instead of securing those borders in the first place.

The suspect, a 39-year-old man, was arrested after a roughly 15-minute drive-by shooting spree through the suburbs of Trappes and La Verrière, about 20 miles west of Paris. According to Trappes Mayor Ali Rabeh, the gunman fired from a grey Renault Clio at a petrol station, a medical centre, a playground, and passing vehicles. Rabeh told BFMTV the shooter was "firing at random, wanting to cause a bloodbath."

France's National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor's Office has opened an investigation for "murder in connection with a terrorist enterprise," with the aggravated circumstance that the acts targeted victims based on their "real or supposed race, ethnicity, nationality or religion." The person killed was "of African origin" and one of the critically wounded was "of North African origin," according to Rabeh. BBC reported that the mother of the 12-year-old girl said her daughter was wearing a headscarf and questioned whether that made her a target. "How could anyone do this to a child?" she asked.

A local police chief told BFMTV the suspect used an "older-style semi-automatic weapon" — Le Parisien reported it dated back to World War Two.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez declared it "clearly a terrorist crime." President Emmanuel Macron posted that "the nation is standing with" the victims.

What Macron and Nuñez didn't post was any plan to address the conditions that keep producing these attacks. CBS News noted that Trappes previously experienced tensions after a teacher there reported threats for saying the state failed to protect Samuel Paty — the teacher beheaded by a radical Islamist in 2020 for showing Prophet Mohammed caricatures in class. The pattern is unmistakable. The institutional response is always the same: more surveillance, more officers, more state power — never border enforcement or deportation of known threats.

The shooting comes as France braces for another weekend of cost-of-living protests after last week's violent unrest. Nuñez announced 70,000 law enforcement officers and gendarmes would be deployed. Elite units, helicopters, armored vehicles, and water cannons are being rolled out. The Louvre and other major museums are closing. Art Basel Paris cancelled its weekend program. The security apparatus that failed to stop a drive-by terrorist is now being turned outward — on the public.

NBC News and WTOP ran bare-bones versions of the official statements. CBS and BBC provided more context on the victims and the broader security crackdown. None of the outlets pressed officials on how a terror suspect obtained a WWII-era weapon and drove through multiple neighborhoods for 15 minutes before being stopped — or why the response to every failure of the surveillance state is always a bigger surveillance state.

The open question: how many more attacks before European leaders — and their counterparts in Washington — secure the border instead of locking down the citizenry?