Personal Responsibility, Social Responsibility and Firearms

In the city-states of Ancient Greece and Rome a citizen was expected to act for the good of the city and society.  This often meant pitching in to help put out fires or apprehending criminals.  It also entailed defending the city.  To do this citizen were often a part of militia and procured weapons to defend themselves.  Each family was expected to maintain order within their own households and to be ready to assist others.  It modern America we have outsourced all these things.  We have fire departments. We have the National Guard as well as a standing army.  We have local police departments.  Most citizens of the US expect these institutions to provide personal security and to save them.

Currently there are many threats to us.  There are terrorists who wish to kill us. There are the mentally disturbed who attack the public.  The nation of Israel is under even greater threats and they have taken measures to protect themselves.  This article highlights a few incidents where Israeli citizens acted for the good of their society.

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When homeland security hits home

Since 9/11, a popular bumper sticker has circulated among gun owners. It reads, “The Second Amendment Is Homeland Security.” This is more than just empty rhetoric.

In the last two years especially, street terrorist attacks in Israel have repeatedly been shortstopped by armed Israeli citizens. A terrorist opens fire at a crowded bus stop; a passing Israeli motorist draws his 9mm pistol and cuts him down. A late-arriving security man with an M-16 hoses the twitching terrorist just to make sure.

Another terrorist attempts to trigger an explosive device in a public place. An Israeli housewife draws her pistol and shoots him dead before he can detonate the bomb. The would-be martyr dies alone.

A third terrorist opens fire with an automatic weapon in an Israeli school. What could have been a mass murder on the scale of Columbine or greater is limited to a very short casualty list when Israeli parents and grandparents, who have provided volunteer armed security after receiving state training, open fire and kill him with their concealed pistols.

Note that in each of these episodes, it was an armed citizen who stopped the terror. Not a soldier. Not a security guard. Not a police officer. Just as wolves do not try to seize a lamb under the nose of the sheepdog, terrorists do not strike where armed protectors are known to be present. They scout the turf and select their victims more carefully than that.

Israel began the program of armed citizen guards in the schools after the Maalot massacre in the 1970s, when a large number of children were slain in a terrorist incident. The volunteer parents work in plain clothes, armed with concealed semi-automatic pistols, and are trained by Israel’s home guard. It is significant that in the more than a quarter century between Maalot and the incident mentioned above when the citizen guards shot down the terrorist in the school in 2002, not a single child was murdered in an Israeli school!

The reason is that Israel wisely publicized the fact that the civilian volunteer guards, indistinguishable from the regular teaching and administrative staff, would be in place. It served as a tremendously effective deterrent. No Moslem fanatic who wants to go to Allah as a successful warrior who has slain many infidels visualizes himself making the trip after having been shot down by some geriatric with a gun before completing his mission. Any head trip as arrogant as that of a self-styled martyr cannot tolerate the thought of an ignominious death at the hands of an ordinary victim. It would be like a wolf picturing its own throat being torn out by a sheep: simply unthinkable, and therefore a natural deterrent.

Maybe it time as a society that start to encourage that American virtue Self-reliance and also we need to consider ways to have more responsible gun owners in our society.