views
commentary
continued from page 5
For American gun advocates, of course,
the right to gun ownership is, at its core, a
right to defend one’s self from the state —
and from one’s neighbors.
“The United States is deeply hetero-
geneous and deeply aware of its hetero-
geneity, and that fosters deep distrust
generally,” explained Daniel Correa, who
teaches law at the University of North
Texas at Dallas.
“There is a triple fear that drives” the
American gun debate, he said, and “every
one of these fears is internal to the U.S.,
not external. Right-of-center people are
afraid of the federal government becom-
ing so powerful that states can’t retain
their sovereignty. Among libertarians,
there’s a fear that government generally,
whether state or federal, will run amok
unless citizens can protect themselves
from it. The third level is the distrust peo-
ple have toward each other in the United
States.”
Those fears are not limited to conser-
vatives, Correa said. “The Democratic
base has the same type of fear but tries
to promote the idea that government is
good, or at least capable of being good,
so people don’t need to be armed the way
governments are armed — you don’t need
AR [assault rifles] or tanks, but only the
bare minimum for personal defense, like a
handgun.”
Since the state is the danger, American
laws don’t just permit owning guns; they
actually forbid the government from
tracking those guns.
For example, the so-called “Dickey
Amendment” passed by the U.S. Congress
in 1996 ensures that “none of the funds
made available for injury prevention and
control at the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention may be used to advocate
or promote gun control.”
As columnist Charles Blow noted in the
New York Times last week, that amend-
ment denied the CDC millions of dollars
over the past two decades for the study of
the public health aspects of mass shoot-
ings and gun violence generally.
That was “disastrous,” Blow argued,
because “we now propose policy prescrip-
tions largely in an information vacuum.”
But isn’t that the point? Information
is power, and the gun fight in America is
really about where power resides in soci-
ety, about statist impulses vs. individualis-
tic ones — competing with each other to
shape the ethos of American society.
The federal government is literally
forbidden under law to track gun sales
because knowing where the guns are
would make it possible to take them away.
So, while the Israeli state deigns to
grant its citizens permission to carry fire-
arms as part of a multi-layered national
security strategy that sees a carefully
selected and even more carefully regulat-
ed cadre of armed citizens as one of sev-
eral lines of defense against terror attacks,
the American state isn’t even allowed the
ability to reliably know which Americans
are armed or with what.
There is an irony to Huckabee’s confu-
sion: The situation in Israel may be closer
to the original intent of the authors of
America’s Second Amendment than the
situation in the U.S.
That amendment, adopted in 1791,
reads, “A well-regulated Militia, being nec-
essary to the security of a free State, the
right of the people to keep and bear Arms,
shall not be infringed.”
It was incorporated into the
Constitution of the nascent United States
at a time when the Spanish controlled
Florida, and French and British forces
threatened in the North and West. An
armed society was a vital bulwark against
external threats.
Over time, with the decline of such
threats as America pushed westward, and
with advances in military technologies
that rendered personal firearms all but
useless against professional armies, U.S.
domestic fractures replaced those exter-
nal threats as the organizing rationale for
the Second Amendment.
It doesn’t take much imagination to
grasp how, in the aftermath of the Civil
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War, Southerners might have come to see
the right to bear arms as a kind of rallying
cry in defense of their states and local cul-
tures against the imposing Yankee-led fed-
eral juggernaut, or how many Northerners
and African Americans might have come
to view gun ownership as a check on the
efforts by those very states to rob indi-
viduals of their hard-won freedoms.
Israeli Jews, meanwhile, lie deep within
the liberal Democratic camp when it
comes to gun control. They believe the
state can and should do good. Despite
their deep social and political divides,
Israeli Jews maintain a deep and abiding
faith in their shared fate and communal
solidarity. After the Jewish experience
of the genocidal 20th century, the Israeli
state represents for them an instrument
of collective action that literally rescued
them from oblivion. A powerful state
is thus synonymous with both national
security and personal safety.
In glossing over such differences,
Huckabee neatly avoided the yawning gap
between Israelis and Americans — the
fact that similar results were achieved via
diametrically opposed visions of society’s
relationship with state power — so he
could pretend to have a pro-gun ally in
Israel that simply isn’t there.
This is not unusual when it comes to
Israel, which seems to serve as an inex-
plicably potent symbol in innumerable
foreign political narratives. Friends and
foes alike project onto Israel’s complex
reality their own moral and political sto-
ries, insisting that the Jewish state be the
avatar for whatever imagined good or evil
most vexes them.
Huckabee was doing just that in the
wake of the Parkland school shooting.
Israel, or at least a caricature of Israel he
feels connected to, provided living proof
of his deeply held beliefs about individual-
ism and state power. Israel understands,
he suggested, that it was “not the weapon,
but a person with intent” that caused the
Parkland massacre.
But the facts of Israel’s gun control
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regime show that Israelis expect strict and
invasive state oversight over “the weapon”
too and do not share the American con-
servative’s wariness of either her govern-
ment or her neighbor.
In the end, neither American conserva-
tives nor liberals can really hold up Israel
as evidence for their side in the culture
war. Israel is too well-armed to be an
example for Manhattanites, but too well-
regulated to be an example for Huckabee’s
home state of Arkansas. Israelis’ fears are
directed in very different directions from
those of Americans.
Perhaps the lesson to be drawn from
Israel’s failure to fit neatly into either
American narrative is simply that the pub-
lic debate about guns in America is too
narrow. There may be more policy options
available to Americans than are imagined
by the two sides, and these can only be
seriously explored by moving beyond the
usual fight about whether “guns kill peo-
ple” or “people kill people” to the deeper
disagreements about the character and
future of American society that underlie
this divide and lend it its potency. •
Haviv Rettig Gur is the Times of Israel’s senior analyst.
CORRECTIONS
• In “On One Is immune” (March 1,
Page 12), the name of Lori Edelson,
CEO/owner of the Birmingham
Maple Clinic, was incorrect.
• In the story about “jHelp Detroit”
(Feb. 22, page 16), the best website to
get connected to the help you need is
jhelp.org.
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Only Bingo (WINGO) fundraiser
5:30 pm, March 15 at Knollwood
Country Club is not sold out as it
said in the March 1 calendar. For
information and tickets, contact
czeitlin@ortamerica.org or Caryn,
248-723-8860.
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