Professor Barnett's point is exactly right. But I'd like to build on it a bit to show why this really should be the end of the gun control debate, even though it won't be.
— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) October 9, 2023
Around 700 Israeli civilians were murdered yesterday by Hamas terrorists. That figure is likely to go up… https://t.co/CzZ4LArgz3
This article was originally posted on X.com. It’s being syndicated here with the permission of its author.
Professor Barnett’s point is exactly right. But I’d like to build on it a bit to show why this really should be the end of the gun control debate, even though it won’t be.
Around 700 Israeli civilians were murdered yesterday by Hamas terrorists. That figure is likely to go up as the fog of war clears and proper counting of those lost can happen, but we can use it as a reference point for now. As far as we know, the 700 is not counting IDF forces who responded and were killed in subsequent combat, but rather just murdered civilians.
Israel is a much smaller country than the US, with a bit under 10 million people. 700 killed in a country of 10 million would be the equivalent of about 24,000 Americans being killed in an organized terrorist attack, if you scaled up the population to match our own. That’s the weight of the damage to Israel, it’s like they had eight 9/11s all on one day.
So let’s bring it back to gun control. Israel foolishly does not have a right to bear arms, meaning there could be no immediate resistance to the Hamas invaders, and they had free reign to slaughter until IDF could respond. Let’s assume that gun control in Israel has saved a handful of lives over the years (a charitable assumption). It has certainly not saved 700 lives, especially when you factor in the many murders by terrorist sympathizers that could have been prevented or mitigated by armed Israeli citizens.
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What does this mean for the US? Well, let’s be honest. The main reason the gun control side has any momentum here is because of mass shootings. There are certainly some household murders done with guns, as there are some people killed in the crossfire by criminals shooting at each other. But for the most part in the US, if you don’t engage in gangs, the illegal drug trade, or other criminal activity, gun-related crime is extremely unlikely to affect you. That’s why several very pro-gun states that have low gang/drug crime also have homicide rates akin to European countries. In most of the US, you are quite safe from gun-related crime if you aren’t a criminal.
Mass shootings, however, change that calculus because even though they are rare, they can affect innocent people anywhere. Schools, grocery stores, concerts, movie theaters. If it weren’t for mass shootings, the gun control movement would basically be dead outside of the most hardcore Democrat bastion cities. They very blatantly use mass shootings for momentum to push their authoritarian gun control policies while people are still reeling from tragedy and susceptible to liberty-eroding “solutions” that never deliver the promised results.
Israel is at war.
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) October 9, 2023
We didn’t want this war.
It was forced upon us in the most brutal and savage way.
But though Israel didn’t start this war, Israel will finish it.
Once, the Jewish people were stateless.
Once, the Jewish people were defenseless.
No longer.
Hamas will… pic.twitter.com/eVECGnzLu3
That’s the sole reason there are laws in some states banning so-called “assault weapons” and “high capacity magazines.” AR15s and the like are rarely used in more routine sorts of crimes, but they have been used in some high profile mass shootings to inflict unspeakable horror.
The reason we have the right to have such weapons though is in case we ever go through what Israel is now going through. A handgun or a shotgun is just not nearly as effective against well-armed hardened killers as a semiautomatic rifle is.
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Remember the figure I cited earlier of an equivalent attack if scaled to our country’s size – 24,000 dead. And that’s just the initial attack, not everything else that follows. According to Mother Jones’s database, if you added up every single mass shooting in the US combined since 1982, you’d have 1,128 fatalities. Many of those were done with just handguns, but for this argument assume all the perpetrators used semiauto rifles.
Israel had well over half that inflicted on it in just a day, despite its much smaller population. (And of course, if we had Israel’s population size, our 1,128 mass shooting fatalities would fall to around 34 total dead.)
The fact of the matter is, a domestic tyrant or a foreign invader can inflict more damage on us in mere minutes or hours than all the losses we’ve had from all our major mass shootings combined.
Some may say in response to this that it could never happen here, we don’t have a Gaza equivalent on our borders. It is, thankfully, less likely here thanks to our nice moat, and relatively friendly neighbors. I hope such a day never comes.
That said, I categorically reject arguments with this sort of “end of history” assumption built in. Things can go bad here. It may not be in our lifetime if we are fortunate, or our children’s. But we are the caretakers of a right passed down since antiquity and codified into our Bill of Rights as the Second Amendment. We do not have the moral right to surrender it. And some day, we may be glad we didn’t.
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