Among the core Israeli national narratives fractured by the October 7 Hamas terror attacks and the months of war and violence that have followed was the notion that Israel’s ethos on firearms differed from that of the United States.

Both countries were gun-centric democracies, that narrative allowed, but the U.S. was a land of too many guns and too few laws—while Israelis “trust their state, and don’t fear each other.”  A common refrain emphasized that “in Israel it is not a right to bear arms, but a privilege.”

I knew this mentality well: Before October 7, I had spent over a decade collaborating with Israeli public health scholars and safety activists to better understand how a country with many guns saw only a fraction of the types of civilian gun deaths we do in the U.S. Partner shootings, homicides, gun suicides, accidental shootings, and mass shootings remained remarkably low, thanks to a web of public-health based laws and policies that seemed enviable, if politically impossible, in America.

Many Israelis received firearm training as part of mandatory military service, but the government banned assault rifles for private citizens and issued handgun permits only after an extensive vetting process.

Effective gun policy reinforced social cohesion. While Americans carry guns based on individualized notions of self-protection, Israelis considered gun ownership a shared responsibility.

Such cohesion was often articulated as being not-the-U.S. When the National Rifle Association sent high-level donors on tours of Israel to promote U.S. gun laws, Israelis widely dismissed the efforts as “American mishegas.”

Like many national narratives, Israel’s gun scripts were always based partially in myth. Armed settlers in the West Bank recklessly intimidated and harassed Palestinians. A robust criminal contraband arms market flourished in smaller cities; the victims of shootings from these guns were overwhelmingly Arab citizens of Israel.

Still, American researchers like me could view Israel’s gun safety efforts as models of successful public policy. I worked with groups like the Israeli chapter of Physicians for Human Rights and Gun Free Kitchen Tables that championed coalition-based community safety and advocated for disarmament in “civil space in Israel and the territories under its control.”

That calculus shifted on October 7. A catastrophic failure of state protection tapped into epigenetic–level fears about being Jewish, vulnerable, and exposed—and changed the nation’s relationship to firearms in ways that have profound and lasting implications.

Prior to the Hamas attacks, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—a nationalistic arsonist once expelled from army service because of radicalism—repeatedly tried to weaken gun permit regulations and ease carry rights, arguing that Israel should “take the good things from the U.S.” when it came to guns, but his extremist arguments failed to gain traction.

After October 7, however, Ben-Gvir and his allies managed to fast track legislation that generated an unprecedented spike in armed Jewish civilians. “Carry a Gun, It’s a Life-saver: Ben-Gvir and His Wife Boast of Dramatic Expansion in Israelis Carrying Weapons” read a headline in Haaretz on October 22. Within weeks, the Netanyahu government distributed thousands of firearms and issued more than 30,000 new carry licenses. Contentious Knesset oversight committee meetings detailed how dozens of unqualified people—including Ben Gvir’s personal staff appointees—had been granted temporary authority to approve gun license applications.

“They’re handing out guns like candy,” a senior security official told Haaretz. “There’s almost no oversight.”

Rightist politicians invoked the U.S. to support the gun splurge. Simcha Rothman, a member of the far-right Religious Zionist Party, cited Ronald Reagan and the NRA—“Guns don’t kill. People kill”—to promote expanded gun licensing.

U.S.-based gun rights outlets reflexively lauded these developments, which would lead to the distribution of more than 100,000 guns in the West Bank alone.

It’s understandable why gun sales to civilians spike in times of peril. Guns provide real protection in some instances and the promise of protection in others.

As a longtime scholar of American gun politics, however, I’ve learned that gun safety and security are never as straightforward as the NRA’s “good guys” versus “bad guys” binary makes it seem. Armed civilians rarely prevent crimes such as mass shootings. Potential security benefits to arming civilians are often counterbalanced by rising everyday gun-related injuries and death.

Gun ownership can make people wary of governments and regulations. I once interviewed a man from Missouri who told me that he was “anti-gun” for the first 40 years of his life before he grew concerned about the “gang crime” he heard about on FOX News. He started carrying one concealed handgun for “protection,” then two, and then he bought several rifles. The man ultimately switched his political affiliation from Democratic to Republican because he worried that liberals would take his guns.

Gun politics can also be tribalizing, divisive, even antidemocratic. After the death of George Floyd, gun sellers played on fears and conspiracies to foment white anxiety about Black violence while at the same time citing concerns about police brutality to market semiautomatic weapons to Black and Latino populations. Pro-gun courts in the U.S. overturn firearm safety laws put in place by voters.

The Middle East represents a profoundly different context. But as I tracked Israel’s changing gun policies, it appeared that the right-wing Netanyahu government was doing more than adopting U.S. gun laws: It was also adopting a version of the NRA’s divisive playbook. Ben Gvir’s gun policies papered over security lapses, weakened trust in democratic institutions, and exacerbated existing political and social divides.

For instance, Israeli data had shown that shockingly few terror attacks are stopped by civilians with guns. Still, the Netanyahu government relaxed regulations around shooting other people based on American-style stand-your-ground justice, and doubled down even after civilians were shot and killed in “crossfire” shootouts.

Disproportionate numbers of the newly distributed guns ended up in the hands of supporters of Netanyahu’s conservative/religious coalition. Armed Jewish security squads formed in so-called “mixed cities” where both Jewish and Palestinian Israeli citizens live. Armed violence against Palestinians also escalated in the occupied West Bank—where members of Jewish settler groups had long been allowed to carry weapons, while Palestinians had not.

What does it mean for a nation whose guiding health principles were built on social-democratic solidarity to so rapidly adopt American-style armed individualism?

After October 7, I started asking my former collaborators—leftist Israeli Jewish and Palestinian clinicians, advocates, journalists, organizers, and academics.

“We’ve been attacked,” many told me in the fall, shattered by the violence and the plight of hostages; they understood the desire for firearms. At the same time, no one could believe how many guns flooded in. “People we never imagined are lining up for permits and carrying guns,” one activist said during a group Zoom conversation. Others on the call chimed in. “My husband.” “My grocer.” “My father-in-law.” “Me.”

Being “like the U.S.” when it came to guns emerged as a source of inquietude. One activist lived in a Tel Aviv suburb a block away from a building that was hit by a rocket. Sirens rang in the background when we spoke; still he wondered, “I keep fearing that once peace does come, with all these guns around, how long will it take until we see our first American-style mass shooting?”

An ER doctor told a story about bickering neighbors holding up guns mid-argument. She asked a question that months before would have been unimaginable: “Do you think U.S. gun safety groups might be willing to take up our cause?”

“What violence is being done in our name?” an activist asked as the human catastrophe in Gaza spiraled over subsequent months.

Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir was arming his own controversial security apparatus on the West Bank and promoting racist notions of Jewish “supremacy.”

Lax gun laws increasingly portended existential threats to the socialist underpinnings of Israeli public health, and broader erosions of civil liberties. A leading peace activist detailed ways that the “gun drive is running roughshod over democratic procedures,” and going hand-in-hand with “rising authoritarianism” and “a trajectory of increasingly violent police responses against anti-war protesters.”

Gun safety groups mobilized in opposition.  “I don’t really think Ben-Gvir wants Israelis to feel safe,” a Palestinian Israeli lawyer explained in late December. “He wants settlers and crazies to intimidate others.”

Gun proliferation that began as a response to an external threat had become an enforcer of expansive internal agendas.

Tensions surrounding Israel’s guns became more divisive over time.

Liberal and secular Israelis had long found common cause with U.S. progressives around matters including racism and reparation, gay and trans rights, climate change, health equity, and regional peace. But by January, as seeming allies abroad protested against not just the war in Gaza but the existence of Israel itself, an Israeli Jewish journalist wondered whether disarmament would become more difficult as the country became increasingly isolated. She worried that feeling “under siege, not just by our enemies and Netanyahu but also by the supposedly liberal, modern people in the West who we thought we were part of” would make it harder for Israelis to imagine or “do peace.”

A safety activist told me in mid-March that “anchoring disarmament of the public sphere to peace would mean placing it in the very distant future…so in our messaging to Israeli gun owners, we now tend to speak about an ultimate transition to relative calm.”

However such efforts evolve, it becomes increasingly clear that the decisions Israel makes about gun proliferation today will go a long way toward shaping the future of the nation.

The country can overturn Ben-Gvir’s disastrous gun policies and begin the hard work of countering their polarizing health, social, and political effects.  Such an approach depends on larger upstream commitments to regional stability, and a renewed commitment to what Haaretz calls “the contract between state and citizen” that lies at the core of democracy and public health.

Or Israel can remain a fortress that—similar to the U.S. castle doctrine—arms itself ever more defensively in anticipation of real and speculative threats.

If I’ve learned anything from studying the U.S., an armed and internally divided nation is a nation less able to negotiate, effectively legislate, or meaningfully compromise.

The post What Could American-Style Gun Culture Do to Israel? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Beckett was moderating the panel, titled “Can California Help America Reduce Gun Violence?” and featuring speakers who focus on three major levers in that battle: the research, the funding, and the public policy. Turning to Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, an emergency medicine physician and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis Medical Center, Beckett asked him to discuss his research into gun violence and crime in 2020.

“Homicide went up by 25 percent in 2020, and by 30 percent in many major cities,” said Wintemute. “That’s a year-over-year increase that has never been seen in a hundred years of record-keeping.” There has been a concurrent spike in gun purchases, which began in January 2020, when people saw a pandemic coming. That spike has continued for a variety of reasons, including, he said, “a level of acceptance of and support for political violence that we have not seen in modern history such that 70 to 80 percent of the population accepts that we’ll see large-scale political violence this year or next year.”

“What does this mean in terms of how many more people were killed last year than the year before?” asked Beckett. “And what’s the bigger perspective?”

Homicide rates remain much lower than they were in the mid-1990s, and other violent crimes like robbery have not seen the same kind of spikes, said Wintemute. Researchers are puzzling this out, as well as the fact that homicides have not followed the patterns they anticipated.

“The picture is much more complicated,” Beckett agreed. Take fatal domestic violence. In California, said Beckett, she was surprised to see in the most recent homicide data for the state that “fewer people killed their spouses in 2020 than in 2019.”

Wintemute had also expected to see the opposite. “My single most confident prediction was that intimate partner violence would go up because there would be no escape from the violent household,” he said of COVID-19 lockdowns. He was also surprised to find that the increase in crime wasn’t entirely driven by the increase in gun sales, either.

So what has caused this spike? Brian Malte, executive director of the Hope and Heal Fund, an organization that invests in gun violence prevention efforts around the state, sees two factors at play. “One is the underlying conditions that were existent before COVID in terms of marginalized communities have been extremely exacerbated—the root causes of violence that we know, like income inequality,” he said. The other is that the pandemic rendered the work of community interventionists less effective. Malte sees these people—who work on the ground in cities including Oakland, Stockton, and Richmond—as responsible for the sustained decrease in gun homicides over the past few decades. But their work building trust with young men and others caught in the cycle of violence is almost impossible to do over Zoom. “The more they can get back to their work—in hospitals, on the street—we’ll start to see these rates of gun homicide come down to where they were,” Malte said.

Turning to California State Assemblymember Phil Ting, who represents the 19th District in the Bay Area, Beckett asked, “Where are you focusing your political energies?”

Ting said that the silver lining of our polarized times is that “it has become much easier to get gun legislation through the state legislature.” Ting introduced a gun violence restraining order bill three times; twice, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed the bill before Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 61 into law in 2019.

Beckett explained that a gun violence restraining order is designed to combat America’s permissive gun culture. “The bar to remove that right [to own a gun] is very high,” she said. A gun violence restraining order allows people like co-workers and teachers to alert the courts to remove guns from someone temporarily.

The law has not been widely used, however. “Very few people knew this option even existed,” said Wintemute. The legislature is now funding education efforts, and Ting urged the audience to visit speakforsafety.org to learn more.

Malte said it’s important for such laws to be implemented in a racially equitable manner so that they remain tools to help people rather than another form of law enforcement suppression. This is part of a larger problem for the historically white-led gun violence prevention movement, despite the fact that Black, brown, and Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by guns.

Malte and Ting agreed that philanthropy can only go so far without the support of public funding and political leadership. “Sustainability happens when government decides to make it a core piece of funding,” said Ting. He lamented that at the national level, Congress remains unable to get militarized weaponry off the streets.

California has its own assault weapons ban. But the data on its effectiveness is not entirely clear. “The bans were enacted while assault weapons were very uncommonly used in crime. The effort was to prevent a crisis from manifesting itself among us,” said Wintemute. “It’s hard to show a decrease in the frequency of an event that is rare to begin with.” That said, California has one of the nation’s lowest gun violence death rates, despite having the most mass shootings incidents in the country.

The question of national and state law continued in the audience question-and-answer session, which began with: “If there wasn’t a second amendment, what kind of gun control would be politically possible in California?”

“There’s a very big difference between a right and a privilege,” said Ting, and the United States is an outlier among industrial countries for the ease with which people can buy guns. There is no training, no license, and no insurance required; it’s more difficult to buy and drive a car. The fact that owning a gun is a right “does hamper our ability to put some responsibility on the gun owner,” he said.

Before closing, Beckett asked the panelists to name one or two things ordinary residents can do to combat gun violence. They all agreed that people must reach out—to both legislators and existing organizations—to call attention to this issue, which is ultimately not just about federal and state policy but about people and communities.

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Even in the absence of significant new federal legislation, the gun debate has been transformed since Newtown—and Aurora. And Tucson. And Chattanooga. And Fort Hood. And Charleston. And San Bernardino. And … the list goes on, tragically. Together, these mass shootings have brought so much public attention to gun policy and gun violence that the conversation has changed radically.

How? For many years before the Newtown shooting in December 2012, Democrats avoided talking about new restrictions on guns for fear of losing votes, especially in swing states. In 2008 and 2012, for example, candidate Obama downplayed gun control and emphasized his support of the Second Amendment. Now the Democratic presidential contenders are making gun control central planks in their platforms and it’s a litmus test for Obama’s support.

But does this new conversation mean that we are on the verge of meaningful change in America’s approach to guns? There are many signs of hope for advocates of gun control—and also cause for them to be concerned.

Here are the hopeful signs. The gun control movement has been reinvigorated. Although Congress is stalled (on guns, along with quite a lot else), a significant percentage of the population lives in states that have enacted restrictive new gun laws: Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Maryland, California, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York among them. While the National Rifle Association has dominated campaign spending on gun issues for decades, there’s a more level playing field now largely due to former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s money and former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ Super PAC. Polling shows widespread support, even among gun owners and NRA members, for reforms like universal background checks and banning people on terrorist watch lists from buying guns.

Over the coming years, the NRA faces unprecedented demographic challenges. The country is becoming more diverse, with growing populations of Latinos, Asians, and African-Americans. These ethnic groups report the highest support for gun control among the population. The country also is becoming more urbanized and college-educated, two other demographic characteristics associated with stronger support for gun control. The NRA knows this, and is making a renewed push to appeal to a new audience—as highlighted by their recent hiring of the hip, web-savvy attorney Colion Noir as a spokesperson. So far, however, gun ownership remains disproportionately concentrated among America’s declining demographics: white, rural, non-college educated.

One interesting aspect of the reinvigoration of the gun control movement is its timing—right on the heels of what had appeared to be gun control’s most devastating loss. In 2008, the Supreme Court for the first time struck down a gun control law—Washington D.C.’s ban on handguns—and announced that, as the NRA claimed, the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual right to bear arms. The decision sparked hundreds of legal challenges to gun control laws. Yet the lower courts have upheld all but a small handful of gun laws and the Supreme Court has shown little interest since Newtown in deciding another Second Amendment case. This term, the justices agreed to hear a case involving a gun law—and specifically directed the advocates not to argue about the Second Amendment.

The reason courts have upheld most gun laws is that America, by and large, does not have very burdensome gun laws. That’s due to the political influence of the NRA, which has led a successful 40-year effort to loosen gun laws.

That brings me to the causes for concern. In the short term, at least, the NRA still has a very strong hold on Congress, thanks to single-issue pro-gun voters. Until gun control candidates can count on support from an equal or greater number of single-issue votes, the NRA will maintain the edge on Election Day.

Gun control also has a public relations problem: Support for the idea of gun control generally is at historic lows (even as support for specific proposals is high). And we should remember that as many states have loosened their gun laws since Newtown as have strengthened them. Many of these laws are minor, but that’s only because the NRA has been so successful that pro-gun advocates are left to push for guns in the few remaining places they aren’t allowed: college campuses, bars, and kindergarten classrooms.

Besides the NRA, gun control advocates are often their own worst enemies. There are important and effective gun reforms worth adopting: universal background checks, better reporting of criminal and mental health data into the federal background check database, stronger enforcement of gun laws, cracking down on rogue gun dealers. Yet advocates also push for predictably ineffective laws like bans on military-style rifles, which, contrary to common belief, are not machine guns and are rarely used in crime. Gun control proponents laugh off the NRA’s claim that the government wants to confiscate guns and then propose to outlaw the most popular rifle in America.

The 2016 election may prove to be a historic moment for the gun debate. With Obama’s gun control litmus test and presidential candidates from both parties staking out strong positions for and against gun control, this issue increasingly looks to become one of the focal points of the campaign. While Americans believe other issues, like the economy and jobs, are more important, it may be easier for the two parties to draw clearer distinctions on gun control than economic policy. With more mass shootings undoubtedly to come, don’t be surprised if the election turns out to be a referendum on guns.

For gun control advocates, there’s a lot at stake. If Democrats lose the White House, in an election they are widely predicted to win, gun control will be blamed and likely become once again the hidden stepchild of the Democratic Party platform. And even if a Democrat is elected president, the GOP will hold onto the House so there will not be any significant new federal legislation.

A Republican president, by contrast, could enact new—and looser—gun laws, like national legislation broadening the right to carry guns in public. Gun control advocates, in other words, have new hope and significant political momentum. But they have much, much more to lose this election than they can hope to gain.

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