Israel Rejects NRA’s Guns-In-Schools Claim

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israel-teachers-smallIsrael’s policy on issuing guns is restrictive, and armed guards at its schools are meant to stop terrorists, not crazed or disgruntled gunmen, experts said Monday, rejecting claims by America’s top gun lobby that Israel serves as proof for its philosophy that the U.S. needs more weapons, not fewer.

Far from the image of a heavily armed population where ordinary people have their own arsenals to repel attackers, Israel allows its people to acquire firearms only if they can prove their professions or places of residence put them in danger. The country relies on its security services, not armed citizens, to prevent terror attacks.

Though military service in Israel is compulsory, routine familiarity with weapons does not carry over into civilian life. Israel has far fewer private weapons per capita than the U.S., and while there have been gangster shootouts on the streets from time to time, gun rampages outside the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are unheard of.

The National Rifle Association responded to the Dec. 14 killing of 20 first-graders and six adults at a Connecticut elementary school by resisting calls for tighter gun control and calling for armed guards and police at schools. On Sunday, the lobby’s chief executive, Wayne LaPierre, invoked his perception of the Israeli school security system to back his proposal.

“Israel had a whole lot of school shootings until they did one thing: They said, ‘We’re going to stop it,’ and they put armed security in every school and they have not had a problem since then,” LaPierre said on the NBC News show “Meet the Press.”

Israel never had “a whole lot of school shootings.” Authorities could only recall two in the past four decades.

In 1974, 22 children and three adults were killed in a Palestinian attack on an elementary school in Maalot, near the border with Lebanon. The attackers’ goal was to take the children hostage and trade them for imprisoned militants.

In 2008, another Palestinian assailant killed eight young people, most of them teens, at a nighttime study session at a Jewish religious seminary in Jerusalem. An off-duty soldier who happened to be in the area killed the attacker with his personal firearm.

Israel didn’t mandate armed guards at the entrances to all schools until 1995, the Education Ministry said – more than two decades after the Maalot attack and two years after a Palestinian militant wounded five pupils and their principal in a knifing at a Jerusalem school.

Israel’s lightly armed school guards are not the first or the last line of defense. They are backed up by special police forces on motorcycles that can be on the scene within minutes – again bringing out the main, but not the only, difference between the two systems.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor spelled it out.

“We’re fighting terrorism, which comes under very specific geopolitical and military circumstances. This is not something that compares with the situation in the U.S,” Palmor said.

Because it is aimed at preventing terror attacks, Israel’s school security system is part of a multi-layered defense strategy that focuses on prevention and doesn’t depend on a guy at a gate with a gun.

Intelligence gathering inside Palestinian territories, a large military force inside the West Bank and a barrier of towering concrete slabs and electronic fencing along and inside the West Bank provide the first line of defense.

Guards are stationed not just at schools, but at many other public facilities, including bus and train stations, parking lots, malls and restaurants.

“There are other measures of prevention of an attack taking place, which are carried out 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all over the country,” police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said. Many are not for public knowledge.

Gun lobbyists who might think Israel hands out guns freely to keep its citizens safe might be less enamored of Israel’s actual gun laws, which are much stricter than those in the U.S. For one thing, notes Yakov Amit, head of the firearms licensing department at the Ministry of Public Security, Israeli law does not guarantee the right to bear arms as the U.S. Constitution does.

“The policy in Israel is restrictive,” he said.

Read more at CBS NEWS

{Matzav.com Newscenter}


11 COMMENTS

  1. From the point of view of the guard (or the policeman or the armed civilian), there is absolutely no difference between a terrorist or a psycho. Both are intent on harming those he is guarding and both must be stopped in the quickest and safest manner possible. In most cases that manner is to shoot the attacker.

    Aryeh Zelasko
    Beit Shemesh

  2. Note, Israel hasn’t rejected their premise, just that their system shouldn’t be the basis for it.

    If shopping malls and Manhattan department stores have armed guards, why shouldn’t schools have them? Because it’s too expensive? That’s not a reason to play with children’s security.

  3. Having served as an (armed) anti-terrorist guard in Israel, I’d like to point out that guns have always been restricted to military personnel and a few others. Also, terrorists in Israel fit a particular profile. If someone isn’t an Arab they’re almost guaranteed not a terrorist. The only problem is that most Arabs aren’t terrorists, either, so you have to have enough judgment not to harm non-terrorists.

    In the US there is no profile for school shooters – or any other, for that matter. and what’s to stop the shooter from coming in the back door, where the guard isn’t? That’s how the Virginia Tech killer got in with his guns. He went in the front door unarmed, unlocked a back door, and came back later with his weapons.

    There is no simple answer to the problem, no matter what the NRA tells you.

  4. Terrorist or wacko when they step into a school to kill we need someone who can stop them. armed guards OK National Guard OK A trained professional the cost??? after all what did our countries future lose that these children had to offer.( a President- a Statesman- a leading Space engineer-

  5. Terrorist or wacko when they step into a school to kill we need someone who can stop them. armed guards OK National Guard OK A trained professional the cost??? after all what did our countries future lose that these children had to offer.( a President- a Statesman- a leading Space engineer-.

  6. Guns don’t kill people do and the flat fact is that in china they just had a man slash 20 children, which is proof that people do these things not the weapons and a terrorist is by definition a person who terrorises or frightens people, the school shooter and the school slasher both demonstrate this. No law or government can stop a person by laws from doing this. Then also you have had men in the past that have been on the wrong side of the law and changed and were on the right with a gun. Mexico is living proof of gun laws not working. People are responsible for there actions, no one else, we are fools to think different.

  7. “Guns don’t kill people do” is a stupid, thoughtless slogan. Nuclear bombs sitting inside silos don’t kill people either. Yet we’re not handing them out to Iran, are we?

    Wayne LaPierre and the NRA are scam artists paid by the gun lobby (Walmart, et. al) to continue the revenue stream. This has nothing to do with rights except right to profit. Israel, and all first world countries except the US, has very restrictive gun laws for patently obvious reasons.

  8. at #9. While that all may be true the fact remains that further gun restrictions would be cosmetic at best or overly restrictive at worse. Plenty of good yidden who are responsible gun owners here I am sure.

  9. “Israel’s policy on issuing guns is restrictive, and armed guards at its schools are meant to stop terrorists, not crazed or disgruntled gunmen”

    “Israel didn’t mandate armed guards at the entrances to all schools until 1995.”

    Funny way to reject the NRA’s claim.

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