Within two weeks of the Oct. 7 Hamas terror invasion of southern Israel, the major news outlets were all aflutter because Israeli Jews started buying guns in record numbers — and today I have a small example you'll want to read more about.
Israeli citizen Matti Friedman has a column in Wednesday's Free Press titled "Why I Got a Gun." In my Deep Red part of Colorado's Front Range, the headline would be "Why, I Got Another Gun!" and would hardly be news. But I digress.
"More than 300,000 Israelis have requested gun permits — twice the total number of people who owned guns before. In the Tel Aviv area, the number of permit requests rose 800 percent," Friedman wrote, and he's among the new buyers. "This may be the most visible symptom of the way our sense of safety has been shattered. For me, the change is manifest in the form of a small Glock—an ugly little monument to a change for the worse in this country and in the lives of its citizens."
To me, the takeaway is that while Friedman finds guns personally distasteful, he's manned up and done the right thing to protect his family, his property, and his country. He doesn't seem to like that Glock very much, but Oct. 7 taught him to respect the need for it.
ASIDE: I'm not sure anybody loves their Glock. My wife and I own several Glocks, and we respect the heck out of their reliability on the range and the elegance of their engineering and assembly. They're a breeze to shoot (especially since I swapped the standard trigger on my G19 for something with a lighter pull) and maintain. But love? I save that for my prettier guns.
The bigger picture is that Israel was never big on guns. "Most of the armed people you’ll see in an Israeli city are soldiers or police," Friedman explained. "In the United States, according to a Pew study last year, 32 percent of citizens own guns. In Israel, it was under 2 percent."
I'm reminded of an old Jon Stewart joke, back when he was still in the business of telling jokes instead of reinforcing narratives. Just back from his first visit to Israel, Stewart quipped to his American audience about Israeli Jews. "These are not the Jews you and I know. These are not the 'May I help you with your taxes?' Jews. These are the 'Hold my Uzi while I pee on the side of this building' Jews."
It's a great gag and a sad reminder of what we lost when Stewart decided that the Party was more important than the laughs.
But, again, I digress.
The point of bringing up Stewart's old joke is that the Israeli experience with firearms is not at all the same as the American experience. Israel drafts both men and women, and most of the population is subject to the draft. As a result, your average Israeli has a much greater chance of knowing their way around a fully automatic submachine gun than your average American. Hell, an Israeli is probably more likely to know how to drive a tank or conduct recon in bandit country out of an armored infantry fighting vehicle.
But there's nothing like the Second Amendment in Israel and certainly nothing like America's gun culture. (When I write, "America's gun culture," I write it with pride and not with the Left's sneering derision.)
There's little tradition and, until recently, little desire among most Israelis to keep a pistol or a shotgun at home. That seems odd to Americans, particularly given the very real and immediate terrorist threat throughout so much of that very small country.
But traditions and culture change slowly — I'm a conservative and understand and respect that fact.
Sometimes, however, given a big enough push, like Oct. 7, things begin to change more quickly.
Welcome to the gun culture, Israel. I'm sorry it had to happen this way.
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