An Israeli parent on the first day of school in 2009 (Photo credit: Gershon Elinson/ Flash 90)
Israel, a country that often
appears to be inundated with weapons, actually extends very few gun
permits to civilians — only 2.5 percent of the population can legally
carry a firearm. But those who are licensed to carry a weapon have
proved capable of acting swiftly and effectively time and again to
neutralize attackers during acts of terrorism.
“In 40-50 cases over the past 10 years, armed
Israeli citizens have intervened during terror attacks,” said Dr. Shlomo
Shpiro, a senior research fellow at Bar-Ilan University’s BESA Center
and the author of a forthcoming paper on the armed Israeli civilian’s
role in foiling terror attacks.
“In 70 percent of those cases, their intervention was crucial,” he said.
In the United States there are an estimated 280-300 million guns in the hands of some 47 percent of all Americans, according to a recent article in the Atlantic,
meaning that close to half the population possesses an average of two
firearms. Yet in the past several years some of the most gruesome public
killings — including the 2012 theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and
Friday’s massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 first-graders and
six women were killed — ended with the suicide of a surrounded
perpetrator rather than rapid intervention from armed civilians.
Although the divide is far from absolute,
there can be several explanations for what seems to be a distinctive
difference between the two groups of civilians.
For one thing, US police, perhaps to a greater
extent in suburban areas and on college campuses, have in several
instances refrained from charging at gunmen, setting an example of
passivity for civilians. Rarely has this been more evident than in the
1999 Columbine, Colorado, shootings in which 13 people were killed while
the Jefferson County police waited for a SWAT team to arrive.
Similarly, during the Virginia Tech massacre
in 2007, in which 32 people were killed, police rushed to the scene and
sought to make contact with the killer but still waited outside the
chained doors of the university hall for five crucial minutes while Seung-Hui Cho murdered people within.
Additionally, some have suggested, the nature
of the assailant and his motivation may play a role. Shpiro examined
cases of nationalist terror attacks by Palestinians on Israelis. In
these instances, the attacker is not exacting ostensible revenge against
a limited, specific group of people, but rather targeting the entire
collective, all Israelis — and, therefore, armed individuals within the
collective are more likely to respond.
But Shpiro, who examined cases from the 1930s
and onward, rejects this notion. The two critical factors explaining
Israeli civilians’ relatively effective responses, he argues, are
training and an embedded, perhaps biblical and religious sense of
responsibility for one another.
The training begins with the military, where
combat soldiers are taught from day one to charge the enemy. The army’s
psychological screening tests are also used to determine who may carry a
weapon post-army, as a civilian.
“If you did not serve, they want to know why,”
said Ronen Rabani, the manager of Krav, a Jerusalem gun store and
shooting range where gun registrations can be renewed and mandatory
gun-training courses are given. “And if you got a 21 profile” – a
psychological exemption from the draft – “then there’s no way you will
ever get a license” as a civilian.
According to the Ministry of Public Security,
which is in charge of both the police force and the licensing of
civilian firearms, a citizen must also show that he or she lives in a
border region or in the West Bank or spends most of their time there in
order to be eligible to carry a firearm.
“If you are a lawyer who lives in Jerusalem
but only represents the citizens of [the settlement of] Kiryat Arba,”
you might be eligible, Rabani said, by way of an example.
The police conduct a background check and pass
the information on to the ministry’s Firearm Licensing Department,
which also requires that applicants present a medical form signed by a
physician. The form consists of 24 questions, ranging from a patient’s
physical health to his or her history of substance abuse and psychiatric
care.
“In Israel it is not a right to bear arms, but a privilege,” said Rabani, standing in front of a case of 9mm. handguns.
And in recent years the privilege has been extended to fewer citizens.
The trend began in 1992 with a Knesset
committee, but took root in 1995 when prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was
gunned down and killed by an assassin, Yigal Amir, who used a legal,
properly licensed firearm. “After the murder, they inserted a new
article whereby if the grounds for issuing a weapon have changed” — if,
say, the person has moved– “then the license is canceled,” Yaakov Amit,
the head of the Ministry of Public Safety’s Firearms Licensing
Department, told Army Radio on Sunday. (It is not clear whether Amir
would have been stripped of his license under the more stringent
regulations.)
Today, Amit said, there are 170,000 Israeli
citizens licensed to carry a weapon, a mere 2.5 percent of the
population. Of these, 40,000 are security guards who work in
supermarkets, malls and schools.
All licensed gun owners undergo mandatory
training, which Shpiro said makes citizens more likely to respond in the
event of an attack.
But the real reason that civilians banish the
human instinct to flee in the face of terror, he said, relates to a
deep-seated empathy in this small country.
He noted the July 2008 case of a terrorist who
plowed toward the crowded Mahane Yehuda market at the wheel of a heavy
construction vehicle, flipping over a bus and killing three people. An
unarmed off-duty soldier, riding a bicycle, charged the vehicle and, in
the midst of a hand-to-hand struggle, grabbed a weapon from a civilian
security guard nearby and shot the attacker in the head.
“The willingness to risk life,” Shpiro said —
stressing that he has never lived in the United States and cannot speak
to the norms there — “is rooted in an Israeli culture of involvement,
and a deep societal commitment to saving lives.”
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