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 Contributing Writers: Ruthan Brodsky, Rochel Burstyn, Suzanne Chessler, Annabel Cohen, Don Cohen, Shari S. Cohen, Shelli Liebman Dorfman, Adam Finkel, Stacy Gittleman, Stacy Goldberg, Judy Greenwald, Ronelle Grier, Esther Allweiss Ingber, Allison Jacobs, Barbara Lewis, Jennifer Lovy, Rabbi Jason Miller, Alan Muskovitz, David Sachs, Karen Schwartz, Robin Schwartz, Steve Stein, Joyce Wiswell Arthur M. Horwitz Publisher / Executive Editor ahorwitz@renmedia.us F. Kevin Browett Chief Operating Officer kbrowett@renmedia.us | Editorial Managing Editor: Jackie Headapohl jheadapohl@renmedia.us Story Development Editor: Keri Guten Cohen kcohen@renmedia.us Arts & Life Editor: Lynne Konstantin lkonstantin@renmedia.us Digital/Social Media Editor: Hannah Levine hlevine@renmedia.us Editorial Assistant: Sy Manello smanello@renmedia.us Senior Columnist: Danny Raskin dannyraskin2132@gmail.com Contributing Editor: Robert Sklar rsklar@renmedia.us | Advertising Sales Sales Director: Keith Farber kfarber@renmedia.us Account Executives : Wendy Flusty, Annette Kizy 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 | Production By FARAGO & ASSOCIATES Manager: Scott Drzewiecki Designers: Kelly Kosek, Amy Pollard, Michelle Sheridan, Susan Walker | Detroit Jewish News Chairman: Michael H. Steinhardt President/Publisher: Arthur M. Horwitz ahorwitz@renmedia.us Chief Operating Officer: F. Kevin Browett kbrowett@renmedia.us Controller: Craig R. Phipps | Social Media Producer Andrea Gusho socialmedia@thejewishnews.com Sales Manager Assistants : Karen Marzolf | Business Offices Billing Coordinator: Pamela Turner | Fulfillment Joelle Harder jharder@renmedia.us 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. 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