The October 7th attacks in Israel were beyond horrific. I've seen the footage from the music festival where hundreds were killed by Hamas and there really aren't words in the English language to describe how bad it was.

In a lot of places, the response to a massacre is to restrict people. The idea is that if bad people can't get guns, then the massacre isn't going to happen.

Folks in Israel, however, recognizes that this is a lost cause--at least, they recognize that in regard to Hamas which has foreign support. They know they can't stop Hamas from getting guns completely, so they did something far more sensible.

They're going to let people have the means to defend themselves at an upcoming concert.

Israel Police will allow civilians to come armed to performances at Tel Aviv's Yarkon Park, Army Radio reported Monday morning. 

This decision comes as huge concert events are set to return to venues, with the first being Israeli star Omer Adam's upcoming show. The return of these large events brings the need for increased security. Security forces decided to allow civilians to attend events with personal firearms, rather than increasing the amount of security personnel, Army Radio report noted.

Honestly, this makes sense.

After all, as we saw in Kansas City, it doesn't matter how much armed security you have at an event, someone may still be able to get through and cause problems. Yet if armed citizens are peppered throughout the crowd--and we know a lot of Israelis are carrying guns these days because of October 7th--then a would-be attacker has to consider that possibilty as well.

That means they're less likely to carry out such an attack because they're far more likely to be put down like a rabid dog and be put down by someone they didn't even know was carrying a firearm.

Look, when you live somewhere that is surrounded by people who want not just your nation but your entire ethnicity wiped from the planet, it doesn't make a lot of sense to disarm your populace.

Israel has steps to mitigate the threat, including mandatory military service, but sometimes, that's not enough. October 7th was an unfortunate reminder of that fact.

Well, it looks like folks there learned. They saw what happened and have decided it won't happen again. They're taking steps to make sure it doesn't.

My fear, though, is that in time, the threat will seemingly pass. Folks there will decide that there's no risk anymore and decide to go back to the way things were. They'll treat guns like cursed objects waiting to warp people's minds into evil things and restrict them or deny them outright.

Then, when their guard is down, it happens again because the monsters aren't mythical. Not for Israel. They're very real and they want nothing more than to devour the entire nation and its people, relegating them to history.

The best way to prevent that is to recognize that the police and military can't be everywhere and in sufficient numbers to thwart this kind of attack, but the potential targets of such an attack can be.

The music festival scene was awful in the aftermath, but how would it have been if the dead had been Hamas, all because there were enough armed citizens there to finish the bad guys off?