Posted on 03/14/2002 2:47:39 PM PST by Richard Poe
"HOW CAN PRIVATE CITIZENS with guns stop terrorism?"
It is a question I often hear from skeptical radio talk-show hosts – even from many who claim they support gun rights. Inundated as we are with anti-gun propaganda, many well-meaning Americans cannot imagine how guns in private hands might be useful in fighting terror.
The Israelis do not suffer from such confusion. Living with terrorism every day, they know exactly what purpose guns serve. And they are not afraid to use them. We could learn a lot from the Israeli example.
According to a March 7 report in the Washington Times, Israel has issued 60,000 new gun permits to civilians. This will raise the number of guns in the hands of Israeli civilians by at least 25 percent. In a population of roughly 6 million, there are currently 265,000 civilian-owned guns.
"There's no question that weapons in the hands of the public have prevented acts of terror or stopped them while they were in progress," stated Police Inspector-General Shlomo Aharonisky. "Chance passers-by have killed terrorists in the midst of gun attacks."
In 1984, three terrorists opened fire on a Jerusalem crowd with machine guns. Half a dozen shopkeepers and pedestrians drew weapons and returned fire.
One terrorist was shot dead by a jewelry store proprietor. The other two fled and were later captured.
"We didn’t expect to find armed civilians," one of the gunmen later admitted.
Last week, on March 5, a terrorist opened fire on a wedding party in a Tel Aviv restaurant. When his M-16 jammed, he charged the crowd with a knife. Three people were killed and 31 wounded.
Forty-six-year-old shoe salesman William Hazan was stabbed in the back. He drew a gun and shot the terrorist, wounding him. Police then arrived and finished the job.
In my last column, I noted that U.S. Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge opposes arming airline pilots. "Where do you stop?" he asked in a March 4 interview in USA Today. If we arm pilots, then railroad engineers and bus drivers will want to arm themselves too, said Ridge.
Evidently, the idea of pistol-packing bus drivers scares some of our leaders. It doesn’t scare the Israelis. "One-third of [Israel’s] 6,000 bus drivers… carry personal weapons to work," reports the Washington Times.
But what if some trigger-happy civilian accidentally kills the wrong person?
That risk has to be accepted, said a retired police officer, in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot.
Won’t looser licensing restrictions make it easier for criminals to get weapons?
"Every criminal who wants a weapon already has one," said another retired Israeli police officer in a radio interview.
End of argument. In two sentences, the most cherished dogmas of anti-gun groups such as the Brady Campaign and Gun Industry Watch have been dismissed.
The Israelis are not smarter or braver than we are. They are simply more realistic.
Those Americans who still believe they can sit out the war in front of their television sets, waiting for the government to save them, need to pay closer attention to what our government is actually doing.
In the hysteria following the 9-11 attacks, the number of federal air marshals was raised from less than 50 to about 1,000. That’s a hefty increase, but far short of the number needed to guard 35,000 flights per day.
Some pilots have already noticed a cutback in the number of on-flight air marshals, according to the March 5 Washington Post.
Phillip Beal, chairman of the Allied Pilots Association’s cockpit defense committee, cites sources in the FBI and Federal Aviation Administration who told him that they are having trouble retaining new air marshals. "It’s an incredibly boring job, waiting for something to happen," Beal explains.
The Transportation Security Administration vows it will put more marshals in the air. But Beal points out that putting one marshal on every flight would require a force the size of the U.S. Marine Corps and would cost almost $10 billion.
In short, it’s not going to happen. And even if it did, it would still leave our buses and trains unguarded.
In 1999, 774 million people made long-distance bus trips, and 337 million rode Amtrak and commuter rail lines. Who will guard these passengers? An army of federal bus and train marshals perhaps?
Not likely.
To the Israelis’ credit, anti-gun crusaders such as Rosie O’Donnell and Sarah Brady have made no impact in their country. No one cares what they say. No one listens.
It is time we Americans stopped listening too.
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Richard Poe is a New-York-Times bestselling author and cyberjournalist. His latest book is The Seven Myths of Gun Control.
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