BLUF
A “massive campaign . . . to de-develop the United States.”
“De-develop the United States.” Ponder that. Mr. Holdren lamented that the idea of de-development was subject to “considerable misunderstanding and resistance.” I for one am happy about the resistance. Indeed, I wish it were stiffer. But as for misunderstanding what “de-development” means, I have to take issue. We know exactly what it means. It is the same thing that Luddites and anti-capitalists have always meant: the impoverishment and immiseration of the mass of mankind just so long as the perquisites for the self-appointed nomenklatura persist un-disturbed.

We Know Exactly What ‘De-Development’ Means: ‘Climate change’ offers potent pretext for consolidation of governmental power.

“The climate crisis,” said Al Gore at the U.N. a couple of days ago, “is a fossil fuel crisis.”

“What climate crisis?” you might be asking, and you would be right to do so. Yes, it is impossible to turn anywhere in our enlightened, environmentally conscious world without being beset by lectures about one’s “carbon footprint” and horror tales about “global warming,” “rising seas” and imminent ecological catastrophe.

But deep down you know that it is all hooey. Mark Twain was right when he observed that it is not so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. Rather, the mischief is caused by things that we “do know that ain’t so.”

For example, we all “know” that carbon dioxide is “bad for the environment.” (In fact, it is a prerequisite for life). We “know” that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is reaching historically unprecedented and dangerous levels. (In fact, we have, these past centuries, been living through a CO2 famine). We “know” that “global warming”— or, since there has been no warming in more than two decades, that “climate change”— has caused a sudden rise in the seas. (In fact, the seas have been rising for the last 20,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age). We “know” that, when it comes to the subject of climate change, the “science is settled,” that “97 percent of scientists” agree that global warming is anthropogenic, which is Greek for “caused by greedy corporate interests and the combustion of fossil fuels.”

It’s really quite extraordinary how much we do know that ain’t so.

Continue reading “”

Okay, so when do we start sending mining missions?

In A First, NASA Returns Asteroid Samples to Earth.

A capsule containing precious samples from an asteroid landed safely on Earth on Sunday, the culmination of a roughly 4-billion-mile journey over the past seven years.

The asteroid samples were collected by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, which flew by Earth early Sunday morning and jettisoned the capsule over a designated landing zone in the Utah desert. The unofficial touchdown time was 8:52 a.m. MT, 3 minutes ahead of the predicted landing time.

The dramatic event — which the NASA livestream narrator described as “opening a time capsule to our ancient solar system” — marked a major milestone for the United States: The collected rocks and soil were NASA’s first samples brought back to Earth from an asteroid. Experts have said the bounty could help scientists unlock secrets about the solar system and how it came to be, including how life emerged on this planet.

Bruce Betts, chief scientist at The Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization that conducts research, advocacy and outreach to promote space exploration, congratulated the NASA team on what he called an “impressive and very complicated mission,” adding that the asteroid samples are the start of a thrilling new chapter in space history.

“It’s exciting because this mission launched in 2016 and so there’s a feeling of, ‘Wow, this day has finally come,’” he said. “But scientifically, it’s exciting because this is an amazing opportunity to study a very complex story that goes way back to the dawn of the solar system.”

The sample return capsule from NASA's Osiris-Rex mission in Utah on Sept. 24, 2023.
The sample return capsule from NASA’s Osiris-Rex mission in Utah on Sunday.Keegan Barber / NASA via AP

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September 24

787 – The Seventh Ecumenical Council, the Second Council of Nicaea, is convened at the church of Hagia Sophia in Nicea, present day Iznik Turkey

1572 – Túpac Amaru the last Emperor (Sapa Inca) of the Incas is executed on order of Viceroy Francisco Álvarez de Toledo on the charge of murdering priests in Vilcabamba.

1789 – Congress passes the Judiciary Act, creating the office of the Attorney General and federal judiciary system and ordering the composition of the Supreme Court.

1846 –The U.S. Army of the Occupation under General Zachary Taylor captures Monterrey, Nuevo León during the Mexican -American War.

1869 – The Black Friday Gold Panic begins as gold prices plummet after President Grant orders the Treasury to sell large quantities of gold after Jay Gould and James Fisk plot to control the market and force up the price on the New York Gold Exchange

1890 – The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officially renounces polygamy.

1906 – President Theodore Roosevelt proclaims Devils Tower in Wyoming as the nation’s first National Monument.

1929 – Jimmy Doolittle performs the first flight of an airplane without without a view outside the cockpit, proving that full instrument flying from take off to landing is possible.

1948 – Soichiro Honda forms the Honda Motor Company

1957 – President Eisenhower sends the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce desegregation of Central High School.

1960 –Sponsored by Mrs. W. B. Franke, the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, CVA(N)-65 USS Enterprise, is launched at Newport News Virginia.

1991 – Theodor “Doctor Seuss”  Geisel dies at his home in La Jolla San Diego

2005 – Hurricane Rita, the most intense tropical cyclone on record in the Gulf of Mexico, makes landfall in the United States at category 5 power, causing 120 deaths and $18 billion in damage in southwestern Louisiana, southeastern Texas and on into the midwestern states

2015 – At least 2,000 people are killed and another 900 injured during a stampede during the Hajj in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

Cancers Appearing in Ways Never Before Seen After COVID Vaccinations: Dr. Harvey Risch

There is evidence that cancers are occurring in excess after people receive COVID-19 vaccinations, according to Dr. Harvey Risch.

Dr. Harvey Risch, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, in New York on July 7, 2022. (Bao Qiu/The Epoch Times)
Dr. Risch is professor emeritus of epidemiology in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine. His research has focused extensively on the causes of cancer as well as prevention and early diagnosis.
In an interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” Dr. Risch said patients must now wait months, not weeks, to get an appointment at an oncology clinic in New York.

here is difficulty in observing whether a vaccine can cause cancer, because cancer usually takes time to develop, Dr. Risch said. It can take anywhere from two years to 30 years, depending on the different types of cancer, from leukemia to colon cancer.

“What clinicians have been seeing,” said Dr. Risch, “is very strange things: For example, 25-year-olds with colon cancer, who don’t have family histories of the disease—that’s basically impossible along the known paradigm for how colon cancer works—and other long-latency cancers that they’re seeing in very young people.”

He said this is not how cancer normally develops.

“There has to be some initiating stimulus to why this happens,” he said.

Continue reading “”

Can There be Good News About Public Violence?

Some of us are afraid of bad news. Most of us know someone who is afraid of going to the doctor because they don’t want to make hard decisions about their health. The great news is that most medical conditions can be treated. That emotional reaction is also common when we consider public violence. It is particularly accurate about how we feel about mass-murder. Many of us feel both compelled to watch the news about public violence, while at the same time we want to turn away and pretend it doesn’t happen. Let me bring you good news. We learned how to stop mass-murder in several ways. We’ve done it, so we are talking about actual practice rather than mere theory. The first thing we have to do is get past the fantasy of Hollywood violence and talk about what really happens.

I’m going to go back to the medical model for a moment. I’ve had friends who oscillated between denial and helplessness. They feel that there can’t be a problem, or that the problem is intractable so why bother. They become hopeless and vulnerable to people who sell quack cures. I won’t do that to you. I’ve studied public violence for a decade, and there is real hope to stop mass-murderers. For a moment, let’s set aside both fantasy and our fears.

Part of us knows that what we see from Hollywood isn’t real. Yes, we might be caught up in the story. At the same time, part of our mind knows that hundreds of people don’t suddenly explode in a flash of flame and get thrown backwards when someone waves a gun around. The truth is that mass-murder is hard, and ordinary citizens stop mass-murderers most of the time. That is fairly obvious if we’re willing to look at it for a minute. Again, I promise it will only be a minute. It turns out that you have lived through the critical experiment many times.

Remember one of the times you walked into a group of your friends and shouted hello. Your friends look at you. One of them points their finger at you and you point back at them and wave. You do that a number of times as more of your friends recognize you.

Then you see a friend of to the side that you missed. You wave and smile to see someone you didn’t notice at first. There is a feeling of an unexpected, pleasant surprise. We didn’t see them at first because we were concentrating on someone else in the group. We thought we saw everyone, but we really didn’t. A friend we didn’t see slaps us on the shoulder and asks how we’ve been. We were looking at the group so we never noticed our friend come up behind us.

Hold that experience in mind for a minute. I could ask you all kinds of questions about your friends and we’d find out that you didn’t really see them at all. How were they sitting? Who was talking to whom? How were they dressed, and what were they doing with their hands when you said hello? We are not a camera, and we imagine that we see more than we really do.

We don’t see everything. As soon as we look at one thing,
we become blind to the rest of the world around us.

(The hard part starts now, but it won’t be long.)

That common experience explains why we kill mass murderers time after time. To put it in simple terms, they don’t see us and we shoot them. Maybe they die right there, and maybe they are only wounded. Being shot at makes the attacker feel deeply vulnerable. Usually, they run away. This wasn’t the violence they had imagined and they usually take their own life.

(The gruesome part is over so you can breathe again.)

There are other perceptual and tactical factors at work, but I’m not trying to make better murderers. The fact is that mass-murderers are vulnerable.

Where ordinary citizens were allowed to be armed, we stopped attempted mass-murderers almost two-thirds of the time. That also had a drastic effect on the number of people who were injured or killed. Ordinary citizens like you saved over a thousand lives. Again, the reasons might not be obvious to everyone.

It is clear that stopping the murderer means that more innocent people aren’t getting shot. It also means we can move the people who were injured to safety and we can quickly start life-saving treatment by stopping the bleeding. EMTs get to the injured victims faster because the scene is safe. There are fewer victims to treat, so each victim gets more attention, and the victims are in better condition when EMTs first reach them.

That is what happens time after time. On average, we’ve done that about every 18 days for the last 8 years. None of that happens while we wait another 15 minutes for the police to arrive.

It turns out that the murderer wasn’t so deadly because he had some Hollywood super weapon. Mass-murderers hunt us in “gun-free” zones. The murderer was deadly because he could kill at will without someone to stop him.

Millions of us go armed every day, but we obeyed the rules and left our guns outside.
The mass-murderer didn’t.

I’m sure that some of you can see the answers already.

  • The personal solution is easy. Make sure that someone can shoot back.
  • The public solution is time tested. We’ve done it for the last decade, and we’ve never had a school attacked where they had a public program of armed school staff.
  • The legal solution is simple. Make property owners responsible when they disarm the people who obey the law. If you stop me from protecting my family, then you become responsible for their safety.
  • The media solution is easy as well. Most mass-murderers kill innocent people so the mass-media will show us their face, their name, and their manifesto. Stop giving mass-murderers a multi-million-dollar publicity campaign.
  • All that might sound simple, but the political solution is harder. We have to ignore quack cures that have failed in the past.

I told you there was good news.

 

Pushback: California county sued for using cellphones to track movements of church-goers

They’re coming for you next: Santa Clara county in California is now being sued by Calvary Chapel San Jose and its pastor Mike McClure for using without warrant the GPS data from the cellphones of the church’s members to track their movements without their knowledge.

On August 22, 2023, a lawsuit was filed by Advocates for Faith and Freedom on behalf of Calvary Chapel San Jose against Santa Clara County, California, for utilizing geofencing methods to spy on church members during the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this year, Santa Clara County imposed a $1.2 million fine against the church for not abiding by the State’s and County’s COVID-19 restrictions.

Santa Clara County utilized an investigative method known as geofencing. Geofencing is a technological tool the government uses to track people relative to their location and likely locations. This tool is typically used in police investigations of criminal activity and, in these instances, requires a warrant– which is not always granted.

The lawsuit complaint can be read here [pdf]. As it notes:

Unbeknownst to the public, Defendants embarked on an invasive and warrantless geofencing operation to track residents in the County. The Defendants used this tool under the auspices of researching so-called superspreader events and activities.

Geofencing is a location-based tool used by the government to track individuals through their cell phone data. This tool is generally used in police investigations of criminal activity and requires the government to obtain a warrant, which is limited in time and scope.

The Defendants specifically targeted Calvary Chapel San Jose (“CCSJ”) to demonstrate the church was a large superspreader. The County hoped to use this information in its ongoing state enforcement action against the church. To this day, the County cannot trace one COVID-19 case to the church.

The Defendants put multiple geofences around the church’s property so they could track when and where individuals were on the premises. This operation took place over a year with seemingly no oversight, boundaries, or limitations – meaning the Defendants could track churchgoers in the sanctuary, prayer room, or bathroom.

This type of expansive geofencing operation is not only an invasion of privacy but represents a terrifying precedent if allowed to go unaddressed. As it stands, the Defendants are effectively arguing that, as long as they call it research, any level of government can target and spy on any individual or group at any time for any duration, and, if they so choose, they can wield the collected data against said individuals or groups who oppose their orders. This is not just un-American; it is downright Orwellian. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentence is the bottom line. Despite imposing a $1.2 million fine against the church for continuing its regular meetings during the COVID lockdowns, the county has yet to document any evidence that the church’s defiance caused COVID to spread at all. If anything, the county’s illegal data-gathering proved it did not, unequivocally.

Of course, any rational person could have told the county this. The lockdowns did nothing to stop COVID, so there was no reason for the church to stop its Sunday services. In fact, the county’s attempt to forbid religious services (while allowing many other group activities to go on), its totalitarian fining of the church, and its illegal surveillance all strongly suggest that county officials had no interest in stopping COVID, but were actually implementing an anti-religious campaign to suppress religious expression.

The county can deny this accusation, but the evidence tells us it is true. Santa Clara County officials decided to use COVID as an excuse to squelch the religious freeom and first amendment rights of this church and its members. In doing so, it is also attempting to establish a precedent that will allow the government to spy on any citizen for as long as it wants, without warrant and for any reason, and then use that data to condemn that citizen.

Note too that the surveillance was without cause, and could not have gotten a warrant even if the county had tried. The church members were not committing any crimes by going to church. If anything they were simply exercising their first amendment rights, guaranteed from this kind of government interference by the Constitution itself.

The lawsuit demands nominal and compensatory damages as well as attorneys’ fees, claiming the county violated the church’s first and fourth amendment rights. I hope a jury gives the church an award that exceeds the county’s fine by many millions.

September 23

1215 – Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan is born in Mongolia.

1338 – A naval battle during the ‘Hundred Years War’ off the North Sea coast of modern Belgium between French and English fleets is the first in which gunpowder artillery is used

1779 – Aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard, Captain John Paul Jones, as Commodore of a combined French and American squadron, engages and captures the British ship HMS Serapis near Flamborough Head off the coast of Yorkshire.

1780 – British Major John André is arrested as a spy by American soldiers, exposing Benedict Arnold’s treason.

1806 – Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery Expedition return to St. Louis from exploring the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

1845 – The Knickerbockers Baseball Club, the first baseball team to play under the modern rules, is founded in New York.

1846 – At the Berlin Observatory, European astronomers Urbain Le Verrier, John Couch Adams and Johann Gottfried Galle collaborate on the discovery of Neptune.

1889 – The game manufacturer Nintendo Koppai is founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi, in Kyoto.

1899 – During the Philippine–American War, the American Asiatic Squadron destroys a Filipino coastal battery at Olongapo, which had been harassing U.S. shipping, in Subic Bay, Luzon island.

1911 – Pilot Earle Ovington makes the first official airmail delivery in America under the authority of the United States Post Office Department

1942 – On Guadalcanal, U.S. Marines begin an attack on Japanese units along the Matanikau River

1950 – During the Battle of Hill 282 in the Korean War, British troops of the 1st Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders mistakenly come under fire from U.S. Air Force F-51 Mustangs of the 18th Fighter Bomber Wing. The first ‘friendly fire’ incident of the war.

1981 – Chief Dan George dies in Vancouver, British Columbia.

1992 – Author Glendon Swarthout, dies of emphysema in his home in Scottsdale, Arizona.

2002 – The first public version of the web browser Mozilla Firefox -Phoenix 0.1- is released.

2018 – American film director and producer Gary Kurtz dies, age 78, in London.

BREAKING: California’s ‘High Capacity’ Magazine Ban Ruled Unconstitutional Under Bruen.

The opinion is here.

If you’ll remember, back in 2017, Judge Roger Benitez struck down California’s ban on standard capacity magazines the state had arbitrarily ruled to be “high capacity.” That ruling was, of course, overturned by an en banc Ninth Circuit ruling. The case was then appealed to the Supreme Court where it sat until Bruen was decided.

After Bruen, the Supreme Court granted cert, vacated the ruling, and remanded it for reconsideration. Today, Judge Benitez has, as expected, struck down the ban as clearly unconstitutional.

As he wrote . . .

Removable firearm magazines of all sizes are necessary components of semiautomatic firearms. Therefore, magazines come within the text of the constitutional declaration that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Because millions of removable firearm magazines able to hold between 10 and 30 rounds are commonly owned by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, including self-defense, and because they are reasonably related to service in the militia, the magazines are presumptively within the protection of the Second Amendment.
There is no American history or tradition of regulating firearms based on the number of rounds they can shoot, or of regulating the amount of ammunition that can be kept and carried.
The best analogue that can be drawn from historical gun laws are the early militia equipment regulations that required all able-bodied citizens to equip themselves with a gun and a minimum amount of ammunition in excess of 10 rounds.

Oh, and this . . .

One government solution to a few mad men with guns is a law that makes into criminals responsible, law-abiding people wanting larger magazines simply to protect themselves. The history and tradition of the Second Amendment clearly supports state laws against the use or misuse of firearms with unlawful intent, but not the disarmament of the law-abiding citizen.

That kind of a solution is an infringement on the Constitutional right of citizens to keep and bear arms. The adoption of the Second Amendment was a freedom calculus decided long ago by our first citizens who cherished individual freedom with its risks more than the subservient security of a British ruler or the smothering safety of domestic lawmakers. The freedom they fought for was worth fighting for then, and that freedom is entitled to be preserved still.

It doesn’t get any clearer than that.

Benitez has issued an injunction blocking enforcement of the law, but stayed his order for 10 days to give Attorney General Rob Bonta time to cry in his beer, inform all of California’s relevant law enforcement authorities, and almost surely seek a stay of the order. Even in the Ninth Circuit, that’s less likely to happen now that Bruen is the law of the land.

As California Rifle & Pistol Association president Chuck Michel tells TTAG . . .

Today’s rulings represent continued affirmation that the Bruen decision, and Heller before that, represent a sea change in the way courts must look at these absurdly restrictive laws. Sure, the state will appeal, but the clock is ticking on laws that violate the Constitution

Judge Benitez used a thoughtful and in-depth approach to this ruling and we are pleased that he came to the conclusion, once again, that California’s magazine ban is not constitutional. CRPA was been fighting this magazine ban from day one and we are one step closer to a final victory for gun owners.

This is a very big win and will likely be the basis for many more to come, including the Golden State’s “assault weapons” ban.

FPC Files Amended Complaint in Lawsuit Challenging Massachusetts Handgun Roster

BOSTON, MA (September 21, 2023) – Today, Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) announced the filing of an amended complaint in its Granata v. Campbell lawsuit, which challenges Massachusetts’ ban on constitutionally protected, modern handguns commonly possessed and used for lawful purposes throughout the United States. The filing comes after the First Circuit Court of Appeals remanded the case to be reheard in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in NYSRPA v. Bruen. The complaint can be viewed at FPCLegal.org.

In addition to state laws requiring that gun owners obtain a Firearms Identification Card or License to Carry Firearms, Massachusetts also prohibits the commercial sale of handguns that are not on its “Approved Handgun Roster” nor prohibited by Attorney General Maura Healey’s “Handgun Sales Regulations.” As a result, Massachusetts residents are prevented from purchasing a large number of popular makes and models of constitutionally protected handguns.

“The analysis is straightforward: (a) Plaintiffs are not prohibited from exercising their right to keep and bear arms; (b) because Plaintiffs’ proposed conduct is covered by the Second Amendment’s plain text, the government must justify the Handgun Ban as being consistent with this Nation’s tradition of firearm regulation; and (c), as Heller and Bruen establish, there is no historical basis for banning arms in common use for lawful purposes,” argues the complaint. “Therefore, the Handgun Ban must be declared unconstitutional and enjoined.”

“Massachusetts’ law preventing residents from acquiring some of the most commonly possessed arms in the Nation is blatantly unconstitutional,” said Cody J. Wisniewski, FPC Action Foundation’s General Counsel and Vice President of Legal, and FPC’s counsel. “Massachusetts residents have the constitutionally protected right to acquire and possess these arms, and we’re looking forward to proving as much in court.”

Harney County judge calls police, sheriffs’ testimony on number of rounds they carry ‘highly relevant’ for Measure 114 trial

Although police are exempt from Measure 114′s gun control restrictions, Harney County Circuit Judge Robert S. Raschio ruled Wednesday that testimony from law enforcement about the number of rounds they use for self defense is relevant for his judgment on whether Oregon’s gun control Measure 114 violates the state constitution.

Raschio said he was partly swayed by a “friend of the court” brief that the National Police Association had filed with the Oregon Supreme Court in late January in support of the Harney County gun owners’ challenge to the Oregon gun control measure.

The judge read a passage from the association’s 50-page brief, to explain his ruling:

“It reads, ‘Because police officers are defending themselves against the same criminals as citizens, their experience is highly relevant to the appropriate scope of self- defense. Over the years, police departments across the nation have abandoned service revolvers in favor of modern semi-automatic weapons with larger magazines. This is true even though police are often working together as a group, with even less need for higher capacity magazines than individual citizens attempting to defend themselves.’”

Raschio said that he agrees that what police use for self defense is “highly relevant,” and will allow the testimony from Oregon State Police Supt. Casey Codding and two sheriffs from Union and Harney counties, who took the witness stand a day earlier, to be considered.

The issue before Raschio is whether the measure’s regulations are lawful under Article 1, Sec. 27 of the Oregon Constitution, which establishes a right to bear arms.

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An Assault on Bill of Rights

The people of New Mexico — and, we fear, the people of the United States — owe Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina a real debt of gratitude.

Medina has stated unequivocally that his department will not enforce an unconstitutional “emergency order” by Michelle Lujan Grisham, the governor of New Mexico, to suspend the right of her constituents to lawfully carry firearms.

The governor’s order is in response to a spate of shootings in New Mexico’s largest city.

“A child is murdered, the perpetrator is still on the loose, and what does the governor do? She … targets law-abiding citizens with an unconstitutional gun order,” state Sen. Greg Baca, the ranking Republican in New Mexico’s state Senate, told the Associated Press.

“I don’t know what her thought process was that she suddenly thought she could trample the Second Amendment,” state Rep. Stefani Lord told KOAT Channel 7 of Albuquerque at a protest against the governor’s order.

The move by Grisham is excessive. It violates the Bill of Rights and it is exactly the sort of escalation that Americans who defend the Second Amendment fear and warn their friends, neighbors and family about when other measures to curtail gun owners’ rights are debated.

Even proponents of gun control, including activist David Hogg and U.S. Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., recognizes that Grisham’s order tramples Constitutional rights.

“I support gun safety laws,” Lieu said on social media, according to a Fox News report. “However, this order from the Governor of New Mexico violates the U.S. Constitution. No state in the union can suspend the federal Constitution.”

We appreciate the congressman speaking out against this violation of the Second Amendment just as we appreciate the police chief’s recognition that his department has no authority to join the governor in violating the Constitution. We hope the rebukes and reprimands are swift and severe enough that this infringement does not spread from the Land of Enchantment to our other 49 states.

Too bad they have such onerous gun control laws.

Police urge gun owners to carry at synagogue as terror alerts spike at High Holidays

Police on Monday encouraged licensed gun owners to carry their weapons to synagogues over the High Holiday period, as the security establishment registered a rise in terror alerts in the lead-up to the Yom Kippur fast day.

Police said in a statement that there has been a 15 percent increase in terror warnings compared to the two months before the holidays and that security forces were at a heightened alert level due to the threats.

Licensed gun owners were urged “to carry their gun in these times.”

The police statement said the number of alerts will likely rise further in the lead-up to Yom Kippur, which begins on Sunday evening.

“Therefore, we call on worshipers who have licensed gun to bring them to prayers. In addition, we call on the public in general to be aware and report any unusual incident in real-time to the police 100 hotline,” the statement read.

Police also said they were monitoring a concerning rise in Palestinian online incitement to carry out attacks.

Monday saw an attempted stabbing near Jerusalem and three separate shooting attacks against Israeli forces in the West Bank, the military said.

On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, an explosive device went off in Tel Aviv’s Yarkon Park in the early hours of the morning. There were no injuries. Two suspects were later arrested on suspicion of involvement.

In the lead-up to Rosh Hashanah, police made the unprecedented move of ensuring there was someone armed in every synagogue in Jerusalem due to the heightened terror threat.

Gun control in Israel has traditionally been relatively strict, with licenses generally only granted to those who can show a need for extra security in their line of work or daily life. Citizens in nearly all cases can own a single gun and only 50 bullets at a given time.

But far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, an advocate of relaxing the laws, has moved forward with easing ownership regulations, claiming having more licensed gun carriers could help combat waves of terror attacks and criminal gun violence that police and security forces have struggled to contain.

Critics have warned that increasing the number of firearms comes with significant risks, including suicides, violence against women, road rage incidents, and murders. According to data from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, of the 32 women murdered with firearms between 2019 and 2021, nine were killed by people with licensed guns.

The High Holidays run through the first week of October, until the end of the Sukkot holiday.