It bears repeating that my first squad leader was a font of practical wisdom, usually doled out in pithy maxims. One I already knew, but liked how he put it was:
“I’ve found that experience is the best teacher, and the best experience is someone else’s as it’s usually less expensive and less painful.”
A word to the wise should be sufficient

What we Should Learn from the Attack on Israel

Terrorists attacked innocent victims in Israel. This is a war of ethnic cleansing. The victims were chosen precisely for their innocence. The murdering terrorists sought out the vulnerable and the harmless. This attack was a show of force, a show of violence, and a show of brutality. It was Hamas and their Iranian enablers saying that they are willing to be barbarians. They wanted other nations to hold them in awe. I don’t think it will work out that way. An Israeli politician said you can’t negotiate peace with someone who has come to kill you. Here in the United States, there are things we can learn from both the Israeli civilians and from the Israeli government.

We watched over a thousand of Israelis die at the hands of armed terrorists. Many more were wounded. Women and children were murdered or kidnapped. Those are exactly the results you would expect. The point is not that the attackers were some type of super-warriors. Those are simply the results that any trained combatant would expect when disarmed victims face armed attackers. It didn’t need to unfold that way.

Let me resize the attack so US readers have a sense of proportion. Keeping the percentages the same and with its larger population, this attack would have killed almost 60-thousand US citizens. That is about twenty times the number of people who were killed at Pearl Harbor in 1941, or during the attack on September 11th in 2001.

Where Israelis were armed and on alert, they defended themselves very well. Examples include Kibbutz  Nir Am and Kibbutz Mefalsim. There we also saw the sort of results we expected. Attackers need to outnumber defenders by a ratio of over six-to-one in order to advance. The terrorists did not bring that number of attackers to bear so the defenders prevailed.

In the United States of America, I noticed that another million of us went out to buy guns and ammunition in the week after the attack. Most of these were first time gun buyers. Again, ordinary citizens like us came to some far-reaching conclusions. They recognized that the world is not safe. People who look just like them are capable of horrific acts of violence. Law enforcement and other government authorities will only arrive long after the attack is over. Far from being conclusions drawn from worse case estimates, I think those conclusions are simply a sober evaluation of the truth.

Israel faces a threat to their very existence. That threat has existed since the state of Israel was formed. Despite the pictures we see of young Israeli soldiers on leave, very few Israeli citizens were allowed to be armed. Those who were allowed to be armed were only allowed to have a single handgun and only 50 rounds of ammunition in their homes. Given the level of threat that ordinary Israelis faced, the politicians who disarmed them were both cowardly and indifferent to the loss of innocent life.

Like the politicians in the United States, the Israeli politicians responded with too little and far too late. Israeli politicians changed the law and now a few more citizens are allowed to go armed. They also doubled the amount of ammunition that can be stored at home. It is not clear to me that ordinary Israelis are yet allowed to go armed in public and carry concealed.

I know that about 100-thousand Israelis (archived source outside the paywall) applied for a permit to own a firearm in the last few weeks. For perspective, that would be the same proportion as 3.7 million US citizens applying for their carry permit in two weeks. Again for perspective, that 3.7-million is between the population of Connecticut and Oklahoma. Only 1.5-percent of Israelis were allowed to own firearms while US firearms ownership is about 25-percent. In contrast, 4-out-of-10 of US citizens live in a home with someone who owns a firearm.

My takeaway is that we allow politicians to lie to us. Depending on your firearms being locked up at home is depending on good fortune. Last week, relying on luck killed thousands of innocent victims. It is true that locking yourself and your family into a safe room buys you time. It took the police and military several hours to respond to an attack. The murderers had all the time they wanted to kill or kidnap at will.

Like the citizens of Israel learned last week, we are on our own during an emergency. Luck favors the prepared. If you are a new gun owner in the US, then there are centuries of civilian gun ownership from which you can draw. Welcome.