Whenever there's a horrific incident of mass murder, advocates of citizen disarmament blame the right to protect oneself against armed attackers. The thinking seems to be that if we make it illegal for all civilians to have guns, bad guys willing to kill people will also refrain from using guns as they try to kill people.
This is implausible.
And if you do not see its implausibility immediately regarding firearms, consider drugs. Not taking them, but the war on same. Drugs didn't vanish upon prohibition. Neither would guns if prohibited.
President Trump argues that students would be safer were schools a harder target. Why not arm well-trained teachers? "If you had a teacher who was adept with the firearm, they could end the attack very quickly." He's right.
Not a new idea, of course. It's been argued, for example, by the NRA, whose chairman says that the way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.
This idea is being practiced right now — in Israel.
As Tzvi Lev argues at the Arutz Sheva 7 site, Israel proves the NRA's point.
Even Israel — where Arab communities are "rife with illegal weapons" despite their illegality — has not always been quick to recognize that it's better to have lots of armed civilians when terrorists start shooting at civilians. But after terrorists attacked a school in 1974, the government began arming and training teachers — somehow failing to defer to the terrorists' preference for gun-free zones.
In both of the only-two school shootings in Israel since then, teachers killed the attackers.
This is Common Sense. I'm Paul Jacob.
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Paul Jacob is author of Common Sense which provides daily commentary about the issues impacting America and about the citizens who are doing something about them. He is also President of the Liberty Initiative Fund (LIFe) as well as Citizens in Charge Foundation. Jacobs is a contributing author on the ARRA News Service.
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