Israeli Official Brags About Effort to Arm Citizens

AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg

Israel wasn’t expecting an attack by Hamas.

What happened on October 7th was horrendous. There’s no excuse possible for the slaughter of the innocent, which is exactly what Hamas set out to do. This wasn’t collateral damage but a targeted attack on those who were least able to defend themselves.

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And Israel had to adjust. They had to adapt.

After all, if the average citizen was the target, then it was imperative that the average citizen had the means to defend themselves, and that’s what happened.

Now, an official and his wife are celebrating the move.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and his wife, Ayala, took to social media to celebrate the success of his efforts to arm more Israeli civilians, loosening the state’s strict gun control regulations and dramatically expanding the number of Israelis permitted to carry weapons.

Ben-Gvir has long been an advocate of encouraging more Jewish Israelis to carry guns. Since taking office, Ben-Gvir said he would make easing the restrictions on obtaining gun licenses one of his top policy priorities. The unprecedented attack of terrorists infiltrating from Gaza into Israel on October 7, the outbreak of war, and the declared state of national emergency has allowed him to expedite the steps he has pushed for.

Last week, the Knesset National Security Committee approved Ben-Gvir’s proposed amendments to gun license regulations so that the conditions for obtaining a license are more lenient, amid the ongoing combat in the south. According to the data presented at that hearing, Israelis have submitted some 41,000 applications for gun licenses since the war began. Despite the Justice Ministry’s position that the regulations be temporary for a period of a year, the committee opted to enact the ordinances on a permanent basis.

Ben-Gvir’s wife, Ayala, clarified the latest changes in a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, saying that they were the result of a “crazy” amount of effort by her husband and his team “from the moment he took office.”

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Here’s the thing that I find interesting, though.

If gun control is the universal good so many people try to claim, why is it one of the first things to be lessened when there’s a threat of invasion?

Israel here has made the requirements more lenient–as much as the committed there could do on their own–because of the threat to its citizens. Leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, officials there adjusted their own gun control laws to allow more people to buy their own firearms.

In fact, when you look at history, this is pretty common. All the rationale for gun control goes out the window when you’re faced with an external threat.

Our Founding Fathers, however, understood this pretty well from the get-go. They enshrined the right to keep and bear arms in the Second Amendment because they wanted to make sure we had the ability to protect ourselves from foreign invasion.

No, there’s not a massive risk of even an attack like what Hamas launched on an unsuspecting Israel happening here, but that doesn’t mean that will be the case indefinitely.

Currently, our nation is so powerful that there’s not really any risk of anyone trying to invade. Sure, there might be terrorist attacks and other things that can happen, but an out-and-out assault by a hostile power? Not likely.

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But that’s today. Our Constitution is meant to be for now and for tomorrow, just as it was in the past.

Israel and Ukraine had to backtrack because gun control sounds great in theory but when the barbarians are at the gate, you put a sword in as many hands as you can.

We don’t have to play catch-up on that front.

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