Whenever there is an act of terrorism, the talking heads all get together and decide to discuss what we can do about the problem. One thing they never seem to acknowledge is that the Second Amendment might just be the answer we need.

That’s because terrorists like softer targets. They want to kill a lot of people.

For some acts, the only real option is to use intelligence gathering to uncover the plots and thwart them before they take place.

But there are others where an armed citizen can make the difference, as we saw recently in Tel Aviv, Israel.

A Palestinian man has injured at least seven people in a car-ramming and stabbing attack in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, Israeli police say.

A police spokesperson said the “terrorist” rammed into pedestrians and then tried to stab them with a sharp object. He was shot dead by a civilian.

Three of the injured were in a serious condition, the spokesperson added.

The attacker has been identified as a Palestinian from the occupied West Bank who was a known Hamas activist.

…

CCTV footage from the scene of the attack in Tel Aviv shows pedestrians and customers of a cafe running for cover as a pick-up truck hits a bus stop on Pinchas Rosen Street.

The driver is seen climbing out of the vehicle’s window and running runs towards a man standing near the cafe, who he appears to stab several times. He then chases after other people on the pavement.

A second video appears to shows another man wearing a motorcycle helmet shooting the attacker several times with a pistol as he lies on the ground.

I’m assuming they mean the guy in the helmet was laying on the ground, though that’s less than clear.

Regardless, this could have been very ugly. There could have been a massive death toll, only there wasn’t. That’s because an armed Israeli citizen was there and had the will to act, thus ending an act of terrorism.

Oh, it’s not ideal, don’t get me wrong. The ideal is for something like this to never happen.

But it did.

Here in the US, we’ve had acts of terrorism as well. After each one, people start talking about what they can do. When the bad guy uses a gun, that leads to calls for gun control.

But terrorism will always use whatever tools it has available. In Nice, France, it was a truck. Here it was a car and a knife.

A terrorist doesn’t need a gun to hurt and kill people.

The average citizen, however, does. You’re not going to talk terrorists out of murder and mayhem. You’re not going to reason them into being peaceful. They want to hurt people and they generally are fine with being killed in the process. That makes them very dangerous; too dangerous to try and take them on unarmed.

Guns aren’t magic talismans. They don’t make the danger just vanish.

What they do, though, is equip people to stop things like acts of terrorism and preserve human life when possible.

That’s just what happened here and it’s what we need to see a lot more of.