In Israel, there's no 'right to bear arms' - and it works

Arutz Sheva ^ | 19/6/16 | Ron Kampeas

[Eleutheria5]

(JTA) Dirty, hot and exhausted Israeli soldiers waiting for their bus home from the army base tend, understandably, to be in a hurry to get on board.

But when I was living in Israel during the first intifada, soldiers didn’t jostle to be first in line. Rather, the most coveted position was second.

That’s because the bus driver had the right – under rules issued by the army and made clear to each armed soldier before she or he left the base – to order any soldier to sit in the front seat and remain alert. And the first one to get on board was the obvious choice.

If you’d just finished three weeks of training with rare interruptions for sleep and were looking forward to a snooze on the long trip home, this was definitely a downer. But it was necessitated by the rash of Palestinian terrorist attacks on bus drivers at the time.

One of the first things visitors to Israel notice is the ubiquity of young people with automatic weapons. Yet Israel suffers the tiniest fraction of the mass killings the United States does. Daniel Gordis, writing last year in a Bloomberg column, reported that Americans are 33 times more likely to kill each other with guns than Israelis. How is that possible?

The answer is couched in that front seat the Egged bus driver kept empty for a soldier.

It may not be immediately obvious, but the Israelis you see armed on the beach or at the cafe are just as subject to the army hierarchy and its regulations as they would be if they were on the front line or a base.

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The careful use of guns in Israel is about being answerable to a hierarchy....

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[Eleutheria5]

Israel and Switzerland do have one thing in common. Gun ownership is membership in a sort of militia. There are protocols, a chain of command, a strong tradition of service in the armed forces. I owned guns in the US, and was careful in their handling, but I was not a part of any militia. It might be worthwhile even on an unofficial level to start drilling and operating as militia. In the next breakdown of civil order, it may be put to the test.

[Eleutheria5]

Ha! You mean, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, secular and religious, Syrian, Iraqi, Moroccan and Yemenite, Bucharans and Bnei Menashe, Ethiopians, that bunch of Chinese-looking Jews who were isolated along the Silk Road for 2,000 years or so, Chassidic, Litvik, Chareidi and Chabadnik, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, German, American and Briton Jews are all homogeneous?

[Eleutheria5]

“beset by satan’s butt licking foes “

Parse that clause and revise it. You’ll be glad you did.

[Georgia Girl 2]

Yes that’s what I mean.

[Eleutheria5]

Then there are the Druze, Bedouins, Israeli Arabs, Samaritans, Arabic and Aramaic-speaking Christians, and Palis, with a few Armenians, some Kurds, and a group of Arabs who live around the green mosque in Kiryat Arba/Hebron who claim to be descended from Moab (credible only because it’s such an ignominious blood line; if they had wanted to make something up, they wouldn’t have claimed to have an incestuous ancestry).

[Georgia Girl 2]

For the most part they are all Jews.

[fieldmarshaldj]

A 1/6th hostile population beats an area where I live where potentially 50% to 2/3rds are at risk for committing horrendous crimes.