France seems to have calmed down

for the moment, but apparently the actions of the 'disadvantaged youths' in this action were considered worse than those a while back. There are a couple of things in the article that just kind of jump out at you. For instance:
IN retrospect, it was not a good idea to have left his pistol at home. Called to the scene of a traffic accident in the Paris suburbs last Sunday, Jean-François Illy, a regional police chief, came face to face with a mob of immigrant youths armed with baseball bats, iron bars and shotguns.

Gee whiz, you think?!?
His bruised and bloodied face signalled a worrying new level of barbarity in the mainly Muslim banlieues, where organised gangs of rioters used guns against police in a two-day rampage of looting and burning last week.

Not far from where Illy was lying was a policeman who lost his right eye after being hit by pellets from a shotgun. Another policeman displayed a hole the size of a 10p coin in his shoulder where a bullet had passed through his body armour.

Altogether 130 policemen were injured, dozens by shotgun pellets and shells packed with nails that were fired from a homemade bazooka. It prompted talk of urban “guerrilla warfare” being waged on French streets against the forces of law and order.

A few paragraphs later:
“It felt like they were out to kill us,” said one of the officers in Villiers-le-Bel last week. “We knew that there were weapons in the suburbs, but they have never been turned against us like that. The kids were shooting at us at close range, loading and reloading their weapons. I’ve never seen anything like it.” Bold mine.

A couple of years ago there was a big article on the muslim-dominated areas around the major cities that noted one thing known to be going on: muslim gangs would steal luxury cars, smuggle them to eastern Europe and take payment partly in money, partly in weapons- from pistols to subguns to RPGs- and the weapons were then used to commit robberies. Considering that, and the general smuggling, they're really lucky the bigshots in the area decided it wasn't time to let the automatic weapons come out. Could be a number of things, could be they're worried about the government reaction with Sarkozy being President:
At the same time he argued that, far from reflecting difficult living conditions, the violence was a result of the “thugocracy” of the suburbs, where drug-trafficking criminals held sway.

“We shouldn’t try to excuse the inexcusable,” said the president in a television address to an anxious nation on Thursday, ridiculing the left’s vision of rioters as “victims of social injustice”. He pledged that those who fired at police would be tracked down, one by one, and tried on charges of attempted murder.

I'm really liking this guy. I just hope he can stay alive and kick the government into taking serious action before things blow completely up.