naraburns nihil supernum
6mo ago
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
Has there been any discussion within Israel or within the broader Jewish diaspora about a change in approach to gun rights?
I can't be the only one who realizes that if the Israelis were armed in the same way that The Americans are, that 10/7 would have looked a lot different. Not the music festival, obviously, but the houses/villages for sure. But actually: maybe the music festival too[1]. Just looking out the window and considering the guns that I know for a fact that my neighbors have (I live in the downtown area of a major, liberal American city), there is absolutely 0 chance that Hamas would be going door to door executing anybody in my neighborhood.
It's pretty wild how much Americans are into guns. To the people who aren't aware: gun nerds have kindof moved past just being into guns at this point. Yeah they own AR-15s, but the are also really into training, physical fitness, radio skills, orienteering, and own some pretty fucking advanced sensing equipment. 15 years ago it was cool to have an Ar15, now dudes are (almost commonly) out here with full on panoramic thermal/nightvision, body armor, etc. It's insane.
[1]: Even the yogi far left borderline authleft people I go to music festivals with own guns. Americans really own a fucking shit load of guns.
It's pretty wild how much Americans are into guns.
I recently got into deer hunting. Game meat is really healthy, you know? Also it's more humane, I think? Anyway, It started with buying a bolt action rifle with a scope, my first firearm ever. Now that I have one, I need to go to the range to practice. This means I need glasses and also ear protection. Best to get the ear muffs that have loud noise cancellation so you can hear conversation. Oh, and there’s an aux input in case I hunt with other hunters and need a radio. Pretty cool. It even comes with two tone American flag velcro patch. Call of Duty vibe intensifies.
Obviously need a full assortment of camo to go with it. No no hunting camo, not like digital pattern camo don't be silly. Well, the military digital camo is cheaper actually, may as well.
Hey hunting deer is actually really challenging and the season is halfway over. Maybe I should branch out into wild turkey hunting. Oh, I need a shotgun for that? Well, why not. Should probably get slugs and buckshot, just for versatility.
While on some hunts I realized I was the only one without a sidearm. What’s the sidearm for? In case bears and cougars attack! Well shit, now I need to go shop for one of those. What will have enough stopping power? Let me head to the indoor range and rent a few and try them out. Hmm, yeah. I think the Glock 40 10mm should do, let me buy that.
Hey, since I have a handgun now, I may as well take a few extra steps to get it ready for home defense: add a silencer and light so I don't go blind and deaf shooting it indoors at night at an intruder.
Good good. Actually, why don’t I get a concealed carry license? May as well carry it with me just in case. It'd be super annoying to get mugged on the street when I have a perfectly good handgun at home. Probably I should take some classes on proper self defense though. Maybe also drill some tactics in case I end up in an active shooter situation. Again, it'd be pretty annoying to have a handgun with a concealed carry license but not know how to handle an active shooter...
Panoramic thermal/nightvision sounds like it'd be really handy for hunting, now that you mention it. Orienteering is probably a good skill to develop just in case I go too far off trails chasing wounded game...
I’m not sure how this gets to AR-15 ownership and drilling raids, but I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time.
Meal Team 6 is kinda wasting their time practicing with guns though. If you want to be ready for the war with the federal government you gotta be going all-in drone warfare.
There are a lot of up front costs with responsible gun ownership. Gun safe, range membership, knowledge of local firearms laws.
So the marginal cost of additional guns is relatively low. Plus if you're putting in range time then guns are officially one of your hobbies. Might as well get more guns.
I’m not sure how this gets to AR-15 ownership and drilling raids
Cheapest semi-automatic rifle firing the cheapest rifle cartridge (and only coincidentally, the best rifle ever made). Full-power rifles suck to actually shoot more than a few times be it on or off a bench, but you can shoot this literally all day.
Provided the deer in your area are small enough this can be an excellent (first) rifle for dealing with them.
Digital form 4s are currently sitting at 201 days estimated processing time for individuals, 236 days for trusts. Between the wait times, the fingerprinting, name and address on a federal registration and just the extra 200 dollars, getting into NFA items is something most people still pass on. eForms (that notionally promised faster processing times but 12% faster on a 270 day isn't much to brag about) silencershop kiosks/form filling software/trust services are changing that a bit but culturally still rare. There also used to be a lot of misinformation and mystery about the process.
That said once you get one stamp, most of the mental and bureaucratic hurdles are cleared and stamp collecting becomes much more likely. After waiting the better part of a year for a can, one to two months to "manufacture" an SBR you can more easily maneuver through a hallway without potential legal implications seems comparatively easy. (And practically speaking actual stocks are more comfortable and ergonomic than braces.)
Yes, it has. I’m a member of a few groups that advocate for gun rights in Israel - membership has gone up significantly.
There is an extra Israeli specific issue to consider, though: most Jewish Israelis don’t want Arab Israelis to have guns, with a few obvious exceptions like Abu Gosh residents and Druze outside the Golan heights. The way to filter out such “disloyal” populations from owning a gun is to require military service of some sort for a gun license.
In the more immediate term, license requirements have been relaxed slightly just last week - allowing a few hundred thousand more Israelis if the “right” sort to qualify, myself included.
Additionally, city watches are forming in more cities further away from the borders. These watches are normally armed with a rifle of some sort.
I’d just like to point out that Israel is currently kvetching over wether an obvious way to enhance their own protection, might be offensive to some of her citizens.
Think about the stark contrast there. Israel is making themselves objectively more unsafe because they don’t want to be mean to the Muslims. Incredible.
I’m sorry, maybe I wasn’t being clear. The point is to give guns only to Jews, because most Arabs can’t be trusted with them. It’s literally the opposite of trying to not be mean to them.
I see. But some Arabs should have guns - the ones that proved their loyalty by serving. Besides, I think there’s a difference of kind between straight-up racist legislation and offensiveness.
More like don’t trust them not to contribute to the problem, either by arming Gazans or by causing more sectarian violence on the Israel side of the barrier. If you live on the far side of Jerusalem, which feels more threatening—a once-in-a-decade paraglider raid, or all your Arab neighbors buying rifles?
I’m not saying this is the correct assessment, but it tracks with what I’d expect non-gun-owners to think about the value of increased gun rights.
No you miss my point. The obvious, rational move would be to say: Israeli Jews can own guns, but Muslims can’t. The test is literally: are you a Muslim? Then you can’t have a gun because you are a dangerous person in a suicide cult.
This is what Israel wants, but it doesn’t do this because of how mean it would be to the Muslims.
Even with the US armed to the teeth we unfortunately can’t seem to stop mass shooters. In fact the deadliest shooting in the US was one man firing into a music festival into the busiest tourist area in the country. Think this is a very hard problem to solve if the shooters are motivated enough.
You believe this because you have been told it - CCW holders and cops stop plenty of mass shootings. The stories are buried at best.
The main point has already been made by @roystgnr . One man army mass murder events are more impactful for the US, that's for sure, but eliminating them is an intractable problem.
Well just this morning I was “told” about 22 more people killed in a mass shooting. The police and CCW holders may have stopped “plenty”, but I think the idea that US gun owners could stop a Hamas attack to be a pure fantasy.
It is funny - I heard about the shooting last night and thought "the guy I responded to on the Motte is definitely going to hold it up as proof he's right"
I think being a firearms instructor and nailing people at a bowling alley may be different than Hamas' door to door executions and roaming through residential areas.
The deadliest mass shooting in the US was the Battle of Gettysburg, a Civil War battle with 7000 deaths.
The deadliest mass shooting of non-soldiers in the US was the Wounded Knee Massacre, a gun confiscation gone wrong with 200 civilian deaths.
The Vegas shooting was horrifyingly awful, but it's still a factor of three below the lesser of those.
(This does suggest that Israel think carefully before letting the genie out of that bottle too; the plurality anti-mass-shooting position in the USA is probably "do a million gun confiscations, and hope they don't go wrong or start a civil war", and it's not because nobody's looking for good ideas instead)
Think this is a very hard problem to solve if the shooters are motivated enough.
If mass murderers are motivated and competent enough it's an impossible problem to solve. A guy with dozens of powerful rifles and a hotel room full of ammo killed 61 people; a guy with a rental truck full of fertilizer and fuel killed 168. Your average one-man-army is a lesser potential terrorism threat than your average farmer, if the latter doesn't worry about getting caught.
In the US we track fertilizer sales more closely now (and farmers aren't generally the mass-murdering type), and many would-be bombers range from incompetent (the Columbine killers planted nearly a hundred bombs, which failed to work; guns were their backup plan) to anti-competent (one suspect in any bombing is the victim, because it's hilariously common for murderers and would-be murderers to blow themselves up by accident) ... but even with Gaza blockaded, Hamas manages to manufacture and employ working explosives and even mostly-working rockets readily enough. Not driving truck bombs through the breach this month was a tactical choice, not a tactical necessity.
On the other hand, even reducing a problem with a non-100%-solution is better than nothing. These hypothetical truck bombs might not have all made it to their targets before getting stopped by an airstrike, and likewise the non-hypothetical gunmen might not have all made it to their targets before getting stopped by a more-armed citizenry. A more-armed Israeli citizenry might lead to other unintended deaths, but so do Israeli airstrikes.
Not the parent but, to paraphrase, the mass shootings which the media focuses on have relatively small impact compared to state-sanctioned violence. They also have a small impact compared to the garden variety inner-city homicide which kills more than 1000 Columbines worth of people every year.
The media chooses to amplify the mass shooting events because it's great for ratings and it plays to their prejudices about red states.
Sadly, the media is literally™ killing people because the focus on these events makes them more likely to occur.
The OP thinks personal gun ownership might help defend against Hamas terror attacks. YouEssAy is skeptical because US gun ownership hasn’t defended against a different sort of attack. I lose the thread when royst says, uh, enough soldiers shooting back and forth is worse. What’s that got to do with the price of ammo in Jerusalem?
What’s that got to do with the price of ammo in Jerusalem?
The second half of my comment was less conclusive than the first. From the right perspective, is that really such a bad thing? The right way to reason is to start with raw facts and hope you can eventually accumulate enough of them to deduce conclusions. If you don't start reasoning until you have all the implications in hand then you're doing it exactly backwards. That's supposed to be an unconscious flaw in human reasoning, not a conscious goal!
Admittedly I might not have chimed in on such a grossly hard problem with a nuanced and inconclusive answer if vague points with varying consequences were all I had to add. But someone said the deadliest mass shooting in the US was Vegas, and it wasn't, and so I gave two counterexamples, but then tried to keep at least partly on-topic afterwards.
If someone says "2 + 2 = 5, therefore you shouldn't kick puppies and you should agree with my politics", then I'm the sort of person who'll point out "2 + 2 = 4" even if I don't have much to add to the rest of the sentence.
I do find it interesting to see the responses when I do that, though. Sometimes you get "Oh, so it is; but here are some unrelated good reasons for not puppy-kicking or disagreeing with my politics". Other times you get "those just aren't sufficiently large values of 2!" or "why should I listen to what an obvious puppy-kicker has to say!"
I’ve got nothing against your choice to include musings, but I mistook them for a single argument. Hence my confusion.
I do have to object to calling military actions mass shootings, though. Mainstream definitions don’t include warfare, and some of them don’t even include robberies and terrorism. There are assumptions of asymmetry in number and preparedness.
I understand that you think this is motivated reasoning. That doesn’t justify diluting the term. Personal violence and state-coordinated violence have different implications for culpability, capability, and potential countermeasures.
The first sentence of that link does: "A mass shooting is a violent crime in which an attacker kills or injures multiple individuals simultaneously using a firearm."
The second sentence says, "There is no widely-accepted definition of "mass shooting"".
We finally get past the part that agrees with me and the part that admits that reasonable people differ and reach, "Definitions of mass shootings exclude warfare", but at this point it seems like an arbitrary rather than a principled exception. If someone wants to make up a term, and they pick "Adjective Noun" but then whine about "but I didn't really mean all instances of Noun that satisfied Adjective!", wouldn't it be better just to make up a new term? Logically it's more coherent. Rhetorically it doesn't allow you to steal all the connotations that Adjective+Noun already have, but that's a feature, not a bug.
(Also, I personally would have called the Wounded Knee Massacre a "war crime" rather than "warfare", wouldn't you? I know we're way before the Geneva conventions at that point, but "don't kill all the women and children too" seems like it's not too much of an anachronism to ask for.)
Personal violence and state-coordinated violence have different implications for culpability, capability, and potential countermeasures.
That's a great argument for responding to different subcategories of mass shootings differently. It's not a good argument for caring about them differently ... and it's especially not an argument for excluding the deadliest of them, in the specific context of "which was deadliest"!
That doesn’t justify diluting the term.
The Wounded Knee Massacre is a dilution? Maybe at the time, when that sort of mass shooting got the murderers medals instead of prison, they'd have made that argument, but we should know better now. Nobody should ever look at the mass murder-via-shooting (am I at least allowed to call it that?) of hundreds of innocent people and say "gosh, these mass shootings aren't as bad as I thought!"
Well, admittedly it's only a Mass Shooting (PDO) if it comes from the Valley of Motivated Reasoning; otherwise it's merely a sparkling mass of people getting shot.
bases were overrun, neighborhood watch with former IDF were mostly overrun (some stories of successful Kibbutz defenses, mostly farther from Gaza so they had more time).
I think it would have helped if everyone there had an AR15 ready though. It seemed like those communities only had handguns, which ends up not being powerful in the face of a few dudes with rifles
The Kibbutzim that were attacked near the Gaza border typically had border posts, fencing, security that was monitored, and an armed neighborhood guard comprised of ex-IDF (soldiers rather than just conscripts) and led by a more senior former officer. Those were some of the first victims in these communities.
I really don’t think the modal heavily gun-owning Southern town would fare much better, unless they can spontaneously wake all the adult men, form into a trained town militia, and come up with and execute a strategic plan to counter a large number of trained, armed young men with maps and a plan who also didn’t wake up halfway through the attack.
orthoxerox
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unless they can spontaneously wake all the adult men, form into a trained town militia, and come up with and execute a strategic plan to counter a large number of trained, armed young men with maps and a plan who also didn’t wake up halfway through the attack
You could also train them to do this quickly and call the resulting militia something like hour-men or second-men, I am bad at naming things. I wonder if any countries have tried this in the past, perhaps the US could learn from their experience?
Ironically, this is one scenario where the local police showing up with ex-military MRAPs might actually be useful. Then again, a lot of that militarization started after the North Hollywood Shootout, where the police did find themselves under-prepared and had to borrow materiel from a local gun store.
I think you're right in that the element of surprise probably negates local armaments, but there are examples (Sutherland Springs comes to mind) of quick-thinking locals stopping spree killers. But no American town has faced more than a half-dozen armed opponents in probably the last century.
Very high-variance. There's a lot of people who are 'mall ninjas', who buy a ton of tacticool crap without much serious training or skill with any of it, for whom guns and equipment are probably better modeled as a status or investment thing. On the other hand, there's also a lot of training-as-hobby that goes to pretty high extremes, ranging from cowboy action shooting at the LARPy end, multigun in the middle, and score-based SWAT training at the other end.
There's part of the latter groups who I would rather have than police or even some military people.
What I think is that Israel can't allow American-style gun rights without either allowing Israeli Arabs to also heavily arm themselves, which would make it easier for pro-Palestinian militants to also obtain guns, or writing ethnicity-based gun laws that would make it clear that Israel is an apartheid ethnostate.
Imagine for example a law that allowed American whites to own guns, but not American blacks. I know that here at TheMotte probably a good number of people would support such a law, but out in the wider world of the West this is something that has been completely outside of the Overton window for probably like 60 years now.
but out in the wider world of the West this is something that has been completely outside of the Overton window for probably like 60 years now.
Israel is an apartheid ethnostate and they don't even bother trying to hide it. They don't give a shit about the Overton window, and this policy would be less objectionable than the "dna testing for citizenship" they already practice.
Serving in a country's armed forces is about as far as one can go towards making oneself the direct tool of the country's government, so a law that restricts gun ownership to people who have served in the armed forces is very close to a law that makes it so that the only people who can own guns are either people who support the government or people who are willing to at least hold their noses and pretend to support it.
If the idea of such a law was raised in the US, I imagine that the right would be outraged despite its general love of the military. For example, such a law would essentially mean that if you were born at some point after 2004 or so, you would only be able to own guns if you had been vaccinated against COVID.
The US is not Israel. It's appropriate, I think, for a nation like Israel that is credibly threatened by their neighbours, to demand a higher standard of cooperation and assurances of loyalty from their citizens. I think if the US was at war, or engaged in conflict with a neighbour, it would be appropriate to control the ownership of firearms, including taking them away from anyone that can't demonstrate their loyalty. In times of peace, of course, such restrictions should be abandoned.
If there was a credible threat of US citizens rising up against government tyranny, which pro-gun-rights people seem to believe to be a central motivation for gun rights, I'm sure the US government could come up with some external threat that justifies requiring demonstrations of loyalty from gun owners. (Russia would probably do by twisting the knob on the election interference narrative just a little bit.) This is usually found somewhere on the first page of those "dictatorship playbook" writeups.
This isn't my experience with ex military in the US at least. It seems to be an even split between licking boots more fervently or realizing that any entity who has figured out how to pay $100 for a steel bolt used in helicopters is beyond saving or supporting.
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Notes -
Has there been any discussion within Israel or within the broader Jewish diaspora about a change in approach to gun rights?
I can't be the only one who realizes that if the Israelis were armed in the same way that The Americans are, that 10/7 would have looked a lot different. Not the music festival, obviously, but the houses/villages for sure. But actually: maybe the music festival too[1]. Just looking out the window and considering the guns that I know for a fact that my neighbors have (I live in the downtown area of a major, liberal American city), there is absolutely 0 chance that Hamas would be going door to door executing anybody in my neighborhood.
It's pretty wild how much Americans are into guns. To the people who aren't aware: gun nerds have kindof moved past just being into guns at this point. Yeah they own AR-15s, but the are also really into training, physical fitness, radio skills, orienteering, and own some pretty fucking advanced sensing equipment. 15 years ago it was cool to have an Ar15, now dudes are (almost commonly) out here with full on panoramic thermal/nightvision, body armor, etc. It's insane.
[1]: Even the yogi far left borderline authleft people I go to music festivals with own guns. Americans really own a fucking shit load of guns.
I recently got into deer hunting. Game meat is really healthy, you know? Also it's more humane, I think? Anyway, It started with buying a bolt action rifle with a scope, my first firearm ever. Now that I have one, I need to go to the range to practice. This means I need glasses and also ear protection. Best to get the ear muffs that have loud noise cancellation so you can hear conversation. Oh, and there’s an aux input in case I hunt with other hunters and need a radio. Pretty cool. It even comes with two tone American flag velcro patch. Call of Duty vibe intensifies.
Obviously need a full assortment of camo to go with it. No no hunting camo, not like digital pattern camo don't be silly. Well, the military digital camo is cheaper actually, may as well.
Hey hunting deer is actually really challenging and the season is halfway over. Maybe I should branch out into wild turkey hunting. Oh, I need a shotgun for that? Well, why not. Should probably get slugs and buckshot, just for versatility.
While on some hunts I realized I was the only one without a sidearm. What’s the sidearm for? In case bears and cougars attack! Well shit, now I need to go shop for one of those. What will have enough stopping power? Let me head to the indoor range and rent a few and try them out. Hmm, yeah. I think the Glock 40 10mm should do, let me buy that.
Hey, since I have a handgun now, I may as well take a few extra steps to get it ready for home defense: add a silencer and light so I don't go blind and deaf shooting it indoors at night at an intruder.
Good good. Actually, why don’t I get a concealed carry license? May as well carry it with me just in case. It'd be super annoying to get mugged on the street when I have a perfectly good handgun at home. Probably I should take some classes on proper self defense though. Maybe also drill some tactics in case I end up in an active shooter situation. Again, it'd be pretty annoying to have a handgun with a concealed carry license but not know how to handle an active shooter...
Panoramic thermal/nightvision sounds like it'd be really handy for hunting, now that you mention it. Orienteering is probably a good skill to develop just in case I go too far off trails chasing wounded game...
I’m not sure how this gets to AR-15 ownership and drilling raids, but I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time.
Meal Team 6 is kinda wasting their time practicing with guns though. If you want to be ready for the war with the federal government you gotta be going all-in drone warfare.
There are a lot of up front costs with responsible gun ownership. Gun safe, range membership, knowledge of local firearms laws.
So the marginal cost of additional guns is relatively low. Plus if you're putting in range time then guns are officially one of your hobbies. Might as well get more guns.
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Cheapest semi-automatic rifle firing the cheapest rifle cartridge (and only coincidentally, the best rifle ever made). Full-power rifles suck to actually shoot more than a few times be it on or off a bench, but you can shoot this literally all day.
Provided the deer in your area are small enough this can be an excellent (first) rifle for dealing with them.
They are not. The typical recommended deer caliber range for white tailed deer is from .243 to 30-06. .223 falls below this range.
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Digital form 4s are currently sitting at 201 days estimated processing time for individuals, 236 days for trusts. Between the wait times, the fingerprinting, name and address on a federal registration and just the extra 200 dollars, getting into NFA items is something most people still pass on. eForms (that notionally promised faster processing times but 12% faster on a 270 day isn't much to brag about) silencershop kiosks/form filling software/trust services are changing that a bit but culturally still rare. There also used to be a lot of misinformation and mystery about the process.
That said once you get one stamp, most of the mental and bureaucratic hurdles are cleared and stamp collecting becomes much more likely. After waiting the better part of a year for a can, one to two months to "manufacture" an SBR you can more easily maneuver through a hallway without potential legal implications seems comparatively easy. (And practically speaking actual stocks are more comfortable and ergonomic than braces.)
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Yes, it has. I’m a member of a few groups that advocate for gun rights in Israel - membership has gone up significantly.
There is an extra Israeli specific issue to consider, though: most Jewish Israelis don’t want Arab Israelis to have guns, with a few obvious exceptions like Abu Gosh residents and Druze outside the Golan heights. The way to filter out such “disloyal” populations from owning a gun is to require military service of some sort for a gun license.
In the more immediate term, license requirements have been relaxed slightly just last week - allowing a few hundred thousand more Israelis if the “right” sort to qualify, myself included.
Additionally, city watches are forming in more cities further away from the borders. These watches are normally armed with a rifle of some sort.
I’d just like to point out that Israel is currently kvetching over wether an obvious way to enhance their own protection, might be offensive to some of her citizens.
Think about the stark contrast there. Israel is making themselves objectively more unsafe because they don’t want to be mean to the Muslims. Incredible.
I’m sorry, maybe I wasn’t being clear. The point is to give guns only to Jews, because most Arabs can’t be trusted with them. It’s literally the opposite of trying to not be mean to them.
I think their point is instead of Israel saying straight out, “Arabs can’t have guns”, they prefer to make it harder for everyone to get guns.
Yes exactly that.
I see. But some Arabs should have guns - the ones that proved their loyalty by serving. Besides, I think there’s a difference of kind between straight-up racist legislation and offensiveness.
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Sounds like its on par with the rest of the "western" world.
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Don’t want to be mean?
More like don’t trust them not to contribute to the problem, either by arming Gazans or by causing more sectarian violence on the Israel side of the barrier. If you live on the far side of Jerusalem, which feels more threatening—a once-in-a-decade paraglider raid, or all your Arab neighbors buying rifles?
I’m not saying this is the correct assessment, but it tracks with what I’d expect non-gun-owners to think about the value of increased gun rights.
No you miss my point. The obvious, rational move would be to say: Israeli Jews can own guns, but Muslims can’t. The test is literally: are you a Muslim? Then you can’t have a gun because you are a dangerous person in a suicide cult.
This is what Israel wants, but it doesn’t do this because of how mean it would be to the Muslims.
It's not because of how mean it would be to the Muslims, it's because of how it would provide fuel to the narrative that Israel is an aparteid state.
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Among the diaspora, Randy Barnett has been hammering that argument at length, and has been arguing it for a while; the JPFO have unsurprisingly had a field day, for whatever they're worth now.
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Even with the US armed to the teeth we unfortunately can’t seem to stop mass shooters. In fact the deadliest shooting in the US was one man firing into a music festival into the busiest tourist area in the country. Think this is a very hard problem to solve if the shooters are motivated enough.
You believe this because you have been told it - CCW holders and cops stop plenty of mass shootings. The stories are buried at best.
The main point has already been made by @roystgnr . One man army mass murder events are more impactful for the US, that's for sure, but eliminating them is an intractable problem.
Well just this morning I was “told” about 22 more people killed in a mass shooting. The police and CCW holders may have stopped “plenty”, but I think the idea that US gun owners could stop a Hamas attack to be a pure fantasy.
It is funny - I heard about the shooting last night and thought "the guy I responded to on the Motte is definitely going to hold it up as proof he's right"
I think being a firearms instructor and nailing people at a bowling alley may be different than Hamas' door to door executions and roaming through residential areas.
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The deadliest mass shooting in the US was the Battle of Gettysburg, a Civil War battle with 7000 deaths.
The deadliest mass shooting of non-soldiers in the US was the Wounded Knee Massacre, a gun confiscation gone wrong with 200 civilian deaths.
The Vegas shooting was horrifyingly awful, but it's still a factor of three below the lesser of those.
(This does suggest that Israel think carefully before letting the genie out of that bottle too; the plurality anti-mass-shooting position in the USA is probably "do a million gun confiscations, and hope they don't go wrong or start a civil war", and it's not because nobody's looking for good ideas instead)
If mass murderers are motivated and competent enough it's an impossible problem to solve. A guy with dozens of powerful rifles and a hotel room full of ammo killed 61 people; a guy with a rental truck full of fertilizer and fuel killed 168. Your average one-man-army is a lesser potential terrorism threat than your average farmer, if the latter doesn't worry about getting caught.
In the US we track fertilizer sales more closely now (and farmers aren't generally the mass-murdering type), and many would-be bombers range from incompetent (the Columbine killers planted nearly a hundred bombs, which failed to work; guns were their backup plan) to anti-competent (one suspect in any bombing is the victim, because it's hilariously common for murderers and would-be murderers to blow themselves up by accident) ... but even with Gaza blockaded, Hamas manages to manufacture and employ working explosives and even mostly-working rockets readily enough. Not driving truck bombs through the breach this month was a tactical choice, not a tactical necessity.
On the other hand, even reducing a problem with a non-100%-solution is better than nothing. These hypothetical truck bombs might not have all made it to their targets before getting stopped by an airstrike, and likewise the non-hypothetical gunmen might not have all made it to their targets before getting stopped by a more-armed citizenry. A more-armed Israeli citizenry might lead to other unintended deaths, but so do Israeli airstrikes.
That…neither of those is a mass shooting.
I’m not sure I follow what you’re proposing. Or dismissing.
Not the parent but, to paraphrase, the mass shootings which the media focuses on have relatively small impact compared to state-sanctioned violence. They also have a small impact compared to the garden variety inner-city homicide which kills more than 1000 Columbines worth of people every year.
The media chooses to amplify the mass shooting events because it's great for ratings and it plays to their prejudices about red states.
Sadly, the media is literally™ killing people because the focus on these events makes them more likely to occur.
What’s the implication for the Israelis, then?
The OP thinks personal gun ownership might help defend against Hamas terror attacks. YouEssAy is skeptical because US gun ownership hasn’t defended against a different sort of attack. I lose the thread when royst says, uh, enough soldiers shooting back and forth is worse. What’s that got to do with the price of ammo in Jerusalem?
The second half of my comment was less conclusive than the first. From the right perspective, is that really such a bad thing? The right way to reason is to start with raw facts and hope you can eventually accumulate enough of them to deduce conclusions. If you don't start reasoning until you have all the implications in hand then you're doing it exactly backwards. That's supposed to be an unconscious flaw in human reasoning, not a conscious goal!
Admittedly I might not have chimed in on such a grossly hard problem with a nuanced and inconclusive answer if vague points with varying consequences were all I had to add. But someone said the deadliest mass shooting in the US was Vegas, and it wasn't, and so I gave two counterexamples, but then tried to keep at least partly on-topic afterwards.
If someone says "2 + 2 = 5, therefore you shouldn't kick puppies and you should agree with my politics", then I'm the sort of person who'll point out "2 + 2 = 4" even if I don't have much to add to the rest of the sentence.
I do find it interesting to see the responses when I do that, though. Sometimes you get "Oh, so it is; but here are some unrelated good reasons for not puppy-kicking or disagreeing with my politics". Other times you get "those just aren't sufficiently large values of 2!" or "why should I listen to what an obvious puppy-kicker has to say!"
I’ve got nothing against your choice to include musings, but I mistook them for a single argument. Hence my confusion.
I do have to object to calling military actions mass shootings, though. Mainstream definitions don’t include warfare, and some of them don’t even include robberies and terrorism. There are assumptions of asymmetry in number and preparedness.
I understand that you think this is motivated reasoning. That doesn’t justify diluting the term. Personal violence and state-coordinated violence have different implications for culpability, capability, and potential countermeasures.
The first sentence of that link does: "A mass shooting is a violent crime in which an attacker kills or injures multiple individuals simultaneously using a firearm."
The second sentence says, "There is no widely-accepted definition of "mass shooting"".
We finally get past the part that agrees with me and the part that admits that reasonable people differ and reach, "Definitions of mass shootings exclude warfare", but at this point it seems like an arbitrary rather than a principled exception. If someone wants to make up a term, and they pick "Adjective Noun" but then whine about "but I didn't really mean all instances of Noun that satisfied Adjective!", wouldn't it be better just to make up a new term? Logically it's more coherent. Rhetorically it doesn't allow you to steal all the connotations that Adjective+Noun already have, but that's a feature, not a bug.
(Also, I personally would have called the Wounded Knee Massacre a "war crime" rather than "warfare", wouldn't you? I know we're way before the Geneva conventions at that point, but "don't kill all the women and children too" seems like it's not too much of an anachronism to ask for.)
That's a great argument for responding to different subcategories of mass shootings differently. It's not a good argument for caring about them differently ... and it's especially not an argument for excluding the deadliest of them, in the specific context of "which was deadliest"!
The Wounded Knee Massacre is a dilution? Maybe at the time, when that sort of mass shooting got the murderers medals instead of prison, they'd have made that argument, but we should know better now. Nobody should ever look at the mass murder-via-shooting (am I at least allowed to call it that?) of hundreds of innocent people and say "gosh, these mass shootings aren't as bad as I thought!"
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Well, admittedly it's only a Mass Shooting (PDO) if it comes from the Valley of Motivated Reasoning; otherwise it's merely a sparkling mass of people getting shot.
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bases were overrun, neighborhood watch with former IDF were mostly overrun (some stories of successful Kibbutz defenses, mostly farther from Gaza so they had more time).
I think it would have helped if everyone there had an AR15 ready though. It seemed like those communities only had handguns, which ends up not being powerful in the face of a few dudes with rifles
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The Kibbutzim that were attacked near the Gaza border typically had border posts, fencing, security that was monitored, and an armed neighborhood guard comprised of ex-IDF (soldiers rather than just conscripts) and led by a more senior former officer. Those were some of the first victims in these communities.
I really don’t think the modal heavily gun-owning Southern town would fare much better, unless they can spontaneously wake all the adult men, form into a trained town militia, and come up with and execute a strategic plan to counter a large number of trained, armed young men with maps and a plan who also didn’t wake up halfway through the attack.
You could also train them to do this quickly and call the resulting militia something like hour-men or second-men, I am bad at naming things. I wonder if any countries have tried this in the past, perhaps the US could learn from their experience?
Sure, but that’s not the current situation in the US.
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Ironically, this is one scenario where the local police showing up with ex-military MRAPs might actually be useful. Then again, a lot of that militarization started after the North Hollywood Shootout, where the police did find themselves under-prepared and had to borrow materiel from a local gun store.
I think you're right in that the element of surprise probably negates local armaments, but there are examples (Sutherland Springs comes to mind) of quick-thinking locals stopping spree killers. But no American town has faced more than a half-dozen armed opponents in probably the last century.
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Does all this intense hobbyist stuff make them especially useful as combatants or an ad hoc militia, though?
Very high-variance. There's a lot of people who are 'mall ninjas', who buy a ton of tacticool crap without much serious training or skill with any of it, for whom guns and equipment are probably better modeled as a status or investment thing. On the other hand, there's also a lot of training-as-hobby that goes to pretty high extremes, ranging from cowboy action shooting at the LARPy end, multigun in the middle, and score-based SWAT training at the other end.
There's part of the latter groups who I would rather have than police or even some military people.
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Some previous discussion: https://www.themotte.org/post/705/israelgaza-megathread-1/146562?context=8#context
What I think is that Israel can't allow American-style gun rights without either allowing Israeli Arabs to also heavily arm themselves, which would make it easier for pro-Palestinian militants to also obtain guns, or writing ethnicity-based gun laws that would make it clear that Israel is an apartheid ethnostate.
Imagine for example a law that allowed American whites to own guns, but not American blacks. I know that here at TheMotte probably a good number of people would support such a law, but out in the wider world of the West this is something that has been completely outside of the Overton window for probably like 60 years now.
Israel is an apartheid ethnostate and they don't even bother trying to hide it. They don't give a shit about the Overton window, and this policy would be less objectionable than the "dna testing for citizenship" they already practice.
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Well, it's easy: make gun ownership dependent on completing your military service. Israeli Arabs can't serve in the IDF with some exceptions.
Serving in a country's armed forces is about as far as one can go towards making oneself the direct tool of the country's government, so a law that restricts gun ownership to people who have served in the armed forces is very close to a law that makes it so that the only people who can own guns are either people who support the government or people who are willing to at least hold their noses and pretend to support it.
If the idea of such a law was raised in the US, I imagine that the right would be outraged despite its general love of the military. For example, such a law would essentially mean that if you were born at some point after 2004 or so, you would only be able to own guns if you had been vaccinated against COVID.
The US is not Israel. It's appropriate, I think, for a nation like Israel that is credibly threatened by their neighbours, to demand a higher standard of cooperation and assurances of loyalty from their citizens. I think if the US was at war, or engaged in conflict with a neighbour, it would be appropriate to control the ownership of firearms, including taking them away from anyone that can't demonstrate their loyalty. In times of peace, of course, such restrictions should be abandoned.
If there was a credible threat of US citizens rising up against government tyranny, which pro-gun-rights people seem to believe to be a central motivation for gun rights, I'm sure the US government could come up with some external threat that justifies requiring demonstrations of loyalty from gun owners. (Russia would probably do by twisting the knob on the election interference narrative just a little bit.) This is usually found somewhere on the first page of those "dictatorship playbook" writeups.
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This isn't my experience with ex military in the US at least. It seems to be an even split between licking boots more fervently or realizing that any entity who has figured out how to pay $100 for a steel bolt used in helicopters is beyond saving or supporting.
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Isn’t it rather that Israeli Arabs are permitted to serve, but are exempt from conscription, with some exceptions? That is what this IDF webpage says.
Right, thanks for the correction. Even so, an Arab that served in the IDF would be unlikely to be pro-Palestinian.
No, I wouldn't think so.
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