2 Feb 23
“Terrorists want to die, but only on their own terms.
Our goal is to grant them half their wish!”
Phil Messina
Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, (whom I quoted two days ago) is making big changes at his Ministry’s Firearm Licensing Department, making it vastly easier for Israeli citizens to own and carry guns for personal protection.
Citing several recent examples where armed citizens incisively thwarted terrorist attacks, Ben Gvir said,
“These are excellent examples of the great necessity and importance of our citizens carrying guns, and we have a duty to speed-up the process and dramatically shorten the bureaucracy, for the safety of our children, for the lives of all of us!”
Currently in Israel, who want to own and carry gun(s) still have to “show a need” and be personally interviewed in order to be granted a “license” to do so.
However, Army officers and NCOs are not required to return their guns, nor be interviewed, when they are discharged from reserve service, and citizens who have been in continuous possession of a firearm permit for ten years are now allowed to retain it indefinitely.
Recently, an enormous surge in gun applications by frightened Israelis has flooded Ben Gvir’s Ministry!
This in the wake of destructive Arab rioting in a number of cities, continuing anti-Jewish threats by Hamas as well as other notorious terror groups, and last week’s precipitous murder of seven unarmed Israelis outside a Jerusalem synagogue, perpetrated by a single Palestinian terrorist (subsequently killed by police)
Yet, many (probably most) ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews have never served in the military, nor in police services (owing to religious tenants), and many among them believe carrying guns on the Sabbath represents a violation Jewish Law. They (and their families) thus remain extremely vulnerable, but that is their choice!
Comment: Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben Gvir are modern Israeli heroes, trying their best to protect citizens and promote individual freedom and liberty, while still working within overgrown, self-protective, impossibly sluggish government bureaucracies!
There is simply no way any species of bureaucracy will ever voluntarily reduce its size and influence. In fact, there is only one thing any bureaucracy ever does well, and that is “promote itself!”
Amoebic, power-hungry bureaucracies (is there another kind?) continue to suffocate rights and liberties of all
of us, here and there.
It takes real heroes to put them in their place (before we all find ourselves confined within a gigantic, omnipresent post office)!
“I live in the ‘Managerial Age,’ in a world of ‘Admin.’
The greatest evil is not now done in sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint, nor is it done even in ‘concentration camps.’
In those we see its final result!
Rather, it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men in white collars, cut fingernails, and smooth-shaven cheeks, who never need to raise their voices.
Hence, naturally enough my symbol for “hell” is something like the bureaucracy of a police state”
CS Lewis
/John
