The first time I saw a group of girls in the mall with an M-16 slung over their shoulders, I was startled. But then I saw off-duty soldiers in a taxi and on the train, security guards in front of the movie theater, a couple walking a dog – and all were carrying guns. In time, I began to care less, until I stopped noticing altogether.
Firearms seem to be an integral part of everyday life in Israel. To outsiders, the country can seem like a heavily fortified place, armed to the teeth. Yet school shootings, like the one that took place in Florida last month in which 17 people were killed[1], are virtually unheard of.
Just earlier this week in the Maryland, a 17-year-old male opened fire[2] with a handgun in the hallway of a Maryland high school, critically wounding a female student and a male victim. The school resource officer at Great Mills High, Deputy Blaine Gaskill, intervened, firing and hitting the shooter with a single round, thereby preventing an even greater tragedy. The shooter, who was identified as Austin Wyatt Rollins, later died in a hospital.
The recent shootings add fuel in the debate over gun laws in the United States.
“We call it the ‘copycat effect,’” says Prof. Mali Shakori Biton, head of the Department of Criminology at Ariel University. “One person imitated the act of the other. It is like a snowball. It increases with every incident.”
Indeed, in the US that snowball seems to be growing bigger and bigger. According to CNN, the shooting in Maryland is the 16th incident in which a gun has been discharged on a school campus in the US this year.
Israel, by contrast, has only rarely experienced the type of large scale shootings involving schools that have unfortunately become commonplace in the US. In 1974, heavily armed Palestinian terrorists infiltrated an elementary school in Ma’alot, near the Lebanon border, and killed 22 children and three adults. In 2008, another Palestinian terrorist killed eight young students during an evening study session at the Merkaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem. However, both gun rampages occurred in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Incidents involving lone and mentally disturbed males shooting at classmates and teachers, cinema-goers or large crowds of people – as happened last year at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas, where 58 people were killed and more than 850 wounded – do not occur in the Holy Land. However, there are other incidents involving guns.
In 2009, deaths resulting from guns in Israel stood at 1.8 per 100,000 people. In the US, the rate was a staggering six times higher, with 10.3 gun-related deaths per 100,000 people. Is it just a question of population difference, with the US seeing more incidents simply because it has a much larger population? Or do other factors, such as gun culture and licensing, account for the difference?
With such numbers, it comes as no
