More than 260,000 Israelis have applied for firearm permits since the horrific Hamas terrorist attacks, according to The Times of Israel.
While the Israeli government has loosened some permitting restrictions, the results are still far from the civil rights Americans enjoy under the Second Amendment.
Itamar Ben Gvir, Israel’s National Security Minister, told the Times his office was approving 3,000 firearm permit applications per day, as opposed to around 100 per day before the terrorist attacks.
“When the war started, we knew that we were right when we said that every person that has a weapon can save a life,” Ben Gvir said, according to the Times. “We need to enable as many people as possible to carry a weapon.”
Previously, Israelis had to serve two years in the Israeli Defense Forces before they could apply for a firearm permit. Now, they can apply after serving one year in the IDF or other national service. In addition, those who work or live in a “qualified dangerous area” can also apply for a firearm permit. Israeli civilians who have no firearms training can also apply, although they will have to demonstrate proficiency before they receive a permit.
Despite the loosened permitting process, armed Israelis must still comply with ammunition rules, use-of-force laws they call “open-fire procedures,” and carry restrictions that most of us would find intolerable.
Takeaways
This is not the first time we have seen armed civilians treated as an afterthought rather than as an additional component of a comprehensive national security strategy.
We watched the Ukrainian army uncrating cases of AKs as quickly as possible and passing them out to mostly untrained civilians as Russian motorized rifle brigades were streaming across the border. Ukraine tried to change this by opening government-owned ranges to the public, but for many it was too little, too late.
Israel, Ukraine, England in the 1940s and countless other countries that have been attacked by their neighbors demonstrate the incredible forethought our Framers had when they wrote the Second Amendment and codified the right to keep and bear arms into law. We are truly fortunate. We became a nation of rifleman and riflewomen. Too many countries learned too late that there is no substitute for a gun culture, and that you simply cannot create a gun culture overnight, no matter how dire the threat.
Any rational person would assume that given these recent events, even the most ardent anti-gunners would shift their positions and hold the Second Amendment sacrosanct. But they won’t, of course. The gun-ban industry’s antipathy toward the Second Amendment has nothing to do with the Amendment’s utility or the fact that it saves American lives and has won World Wars. Gun control has always been about control. To them, the lives lost in gun-free zones simply do not matter.
Thomas Jefferson once said, “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.” The Biden-Harris has done more to infringe upon our Second Amendment rights than all other administrations combined, regardless of the real-world examples we see that prove the need for an armed, trained citizenry.
Minister Ben Gvir was absolutely correct when he said, “every person that has a weapon can save a life.” It is unfortunate that this was said in hindsight. That should never happen again, anywhere, because the ability to defend oneself is an inherent human right, which should transcend rules, regulations and borders.
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About Lee Williams
Lee Williams, who is also known as “The Gun Writer,” is the chief editor of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project. Until recently, he was also an editor for a daily newspaper in Florida. Before becoming an editor, Lee was an investigative reporter at newspapers in three states and a U.S. Territory. Before becoming a journalist, he worked as a police officer. Before becoming a cop, Lee served in the Army. He’s earned more than a dozen national journalism awards as a reporter, and three medals of valor as a cop. Lee is an avid tactical shooter.
Free men don’t apply for permission to defend themselves.
Israel is relearning the lessons Hamas taught it in the ’70s. I remember seeing news articles on Israel where school tea6were carrying Uzis, and female shoppers had M16s strung over a shoulder. Then their version of democrats turned the country into Caliporniastan.
Israel needs to remember Gideon’s 300.
True story. Remember one critical rule from Small Wars: when people say they want to kill you take them seriously. Israeli politicians forgot that rule. They are suffering the consequences.
Question of the day for you all to ponder: If the Arab States were do determined to create a Palestinian State why did they not do so after the ’47 war when they occupied the West Bank, Sinai and the Golan Heights? My answer: they did not because they could not trust the Philistines to form a civil society much less a modern nation state.
There is already a Palestinian state …it’s named JORDAN.
nr – one minor correction – it ain’t the “Israeli politicians” that are “suffering the consequences’ – it is the ordinary Citizens that are paying in blood. Just like here the ‘professional’ gummint folks seem to have (for the most part) armed security on hand. Us plain old ordinary people have to fend for ourselves, at least until they take away our right to do so.
Terrorists are pouring into my neighborhood, shooting, beating, raping! …
Sorry, you’ll need a PERMIT for the means to self defense…. but you’ll have it in, hmmmm… a week or so.
I’d say the citizenry suffer at the hands of TWO terrorist outfits and one of them is their own gov’t.
Kind of like what’s going on here.
juk – “kind of like what the gun grabbers are trying to do here” – there fify.
How much clearer of a picture do you need than Ukraine needing to arm their citizens, Israel needing to arm their citizens, England needing to arm their citizens during WWII. I am sure there are other examples that I am not aware of and if China and N. Korea were armed, it might be a different country than it is today.
The way to keep your country is to have an armed polite society that will kick ass when intruders from the outside or within try to knock down the door. Yamamoto knew that.
We have more problems with gooberment attacking public than terrorists, waco, ruby ridge
m44 – too many have forgotten (or likely never knew) that American gun owners donated something over 300,000 rifles and shotguns to the Brits in ’40 to equip their’ home guard’ (militia??) since there weren’t any military weapons to be had. And after the threat of invasion those weapons were returned, oh wait, the ‘authorities’ dumped them in the ocean.
Speaking as a has been, I see happening in the US the same patterns that happened decades ago in my Third World experiences. Civil societies are fractured and fragmented when their founding principles and premises are subverted. In order to subvert a Western ‘Democracy’ you have to subvert the population. That is done by two means: first, education. Pollute your educational system with foreign concepts and ideologies while you subvert the ‘truths we hold self-evident’ and you corrupt the political culture. Second, flood the nation with folks who cannot understand or assimilate your ‘truths held.’ In the case of the… Read more »
Virtually everyone one of them was trained during their mandatory military service. Then they don’t trust them with firearms? Like our military disarming everyone living on base.
Exactly!
FYI, Personnel living on base can have firearms with restrictions according to the installation’s orders concerning privately owned weapons. If they live in the barracks weapons are stored in the armory. If they live in housing the weapons are stored in the house with the service member.
That photo looks like something out of the “Mad Max” series.
Does anyone know what type of weapon the individual in the picture was actually carrying? I’m not familiar with it.
I believe it’s a Springfield First Line Hellion 556 Bullpup Rifle.
X95 Tavor
Tabor or bullpen, regardless, it’s got some milage on it and it’s definitely not a safe queen!
It’s a Tavor with a MARS sight, that’s an IDF issue weapon. It certainly does look well used!
Now you know why Biden instituted a ban on US civilian arms exports…