3 Jan 16

“Who will not admit he is wrong, cannot repent of his mistake. Who cannot repent of his mistakes, cannot learn from them. Who cannot learn from their mistakes, are doomed to repeat them!”

Anon

“Given that some attacks have been stopped by gun-carrying civilians, Israeli Public Security Minister, Gilad Erdan, in October eased citizens’ access to guns, calling gun-owners a ‘force multiplier’ in combating nearly daily Palestinian stabbing and car-ramming attacks”

Moshe Nussbaum, Israel Channel 2’s Police Reporter, on 1 Jan 16

Nussbaum went on to point out that Palestinian stabbing and ramming attacks directed toward Jewish citizens, when they occur in Tel Aviv are usually successful, and the attacker escapes. When those same attacks occur, or are attempted, in Jerusalem, the attack is typically thwarted or prevented altogether by righteous gunfire emanating from nearby soldiers and armed civilians.

In Jerusalem, there are far more privately-owned (and carried) guns than in Tel Aviv. So, in Jerusalem, Jews fight back (this time effectively), and attacks go down. Curiously, when righteous gunfire is saving innocent lives, you don’t hear the phoney, leftist term, “gun-violence,” do you?

Imagine that!

After being so shamefully mistreated by the British in the late 1940s, Israelis (like so many others) have since gone on to foolishly imitate their abusers, particularly with regard to the private ownership of guns. It was a stupid national blunder, as they’re just now beginning to admit to themselves. Indeed, as Erdan has been forced to concede, civilian gun-owners and gun-carriers are in truth an invaluable “force multiplier” in the fight against Islamic terrorism.

Armed citizens have always fulfilled that roll, all the way back to our spiritual ancestors in Sparta.

How quickly we forget!

“A willingness to fight can be a deterrence to attack and, conversely, an unwillingness to meet a challenge or provocation can make a nation a target for an all-out assault.

‘National honor’ is simply an idiomatic expression for this long-run perspective on national interest, as distinguished from a one-day-at-a-time perspective, which may serve the short-run interests of politicians, by sparing them from making hard decisions, which distinguish a politician from a statesman.

But, many intellectuals have tried to reduce a sense of national honor, like patriotism, to a psychological quirk and certainly ‘an insufficient reason for hostilities,’ in Godwin’s words.

However, even British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, the man most indelibly identified with the policy of appeasement of Hitler, belatedly seemed to acknowledge that national honor was consequential… just months before the Second World War began!”

Thomas Sowell

To “willingness,” I will add “readiness!”

/John