Guns in America: It’s not Israel here

After Newtown, the collective grief was overwhelming, I couldn’t bear to write about it. What, really, could one say about a massacre of little school children? At the time, I thought, after the depth of such a tragedy, once and for all, some progress will be made in gun control.

I know, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. It’s the hate in the heart, the radicalized faith, the mental illness. But the object common to all of these massacres is one thing and one thing only: the weapon.

Again, I get that when people hate, they’ll find anything to kill with. When I was growing up in Israel, it was Molotov cocktails — essentially a glass soda bottle, some rags and fuel. Recently, it’s a cheap kitchen knife that was being wielded to terrorize and kill innocent Jews. Should we ban soda bottles and rags? Should we ban knives?

No and no. They are designed for other purposes besides killing.

How does regulating — not banning, but regulating more strictly — an instrument that is designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to kill a human being … how is this unconstitutional?

If the Second Amendment right is interfering with a more basic right, the right to live, then how is it appropriate or effective not to regulate such a dangerous right?

I keep hearing people who advocate for the NRA using Israel as an example of a healthy and effective gun society. But the funny thing is, in Israel, having a gun is not a right. There is no law that everyone has a right to a gun. Plenty of people get rejected when they apply for a gun license.

And when an application is approved, it is after extensive background checks, testing and with a limited magazine capacity. It is definitely not a semi-automatic. Even the IDF — the military for which weapons are designed — does not use automatic rifles. If a soldier finds it necessary to shoot his gun, he must make the effort to push and pull the trigger. Each time. Spraying bullets is not an option. The matter of taking human life is regarded so seriously that even the military is regulated in the manner with which weapons are to be used.