As soon as news of the mass shooting at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, broke last Tuesday, calls from the left for stricter gun control laws began. The reasons why that’s a terrible idea are numerous and beyond the scope of this post.
Rather than using this tragedy as an opportunity to strip us of our constitutional rights, lawmakers might instead consider why school shootings are nearly nonexistent in Israel. According to Fox News, only six have occurred in the Jewish state since 1974. A comparison of this statistic to the growing plague of school violence in America suggests it’s time to look at the measures implemented by the Israelis to prevent these attacks.
Fox spoke to David Hazony, who writes about Israeli and American affairs and has eleven children of his own. He told the media outlet that the country approaches school security with a “complex, multi-layered approach.” Israel “puts effort into identifying potential assailants through behavioral profiling” and “invests heavily in monitoring profiles of people.”
Considering that when the social media histories of most school shooters are examined afterward, the red flags are all there, this would be a wise first line of defense.
But would the liberals who demand bans on AR-15s in the aftermath of every school shooting allow the government to surveil the behavior of individuals who have been flagged for violent rhetoric and threats in their social media profiles? Or would they shriek of racial profiling and and the violation of these individuals’ civil liberties??
Would social media leaders work with the government to flag dangerous discourse on their platforms or is that courtesy only extended when conservatives express their opinions?
Although an active intelligence network in the U.S. tasked with seeking out threats of violence on the internet is a very sound idea that would go a long way toward prevention of these incidents, it would be costly to implement and maintain. However, when one considers the Biden administration was willing to spend taxpayer dollars to fund a Disinformation Governance Board and so many other stupid, dystopian programs to “protect the homeland,” it’s a smart idea that makes sense.
In addition to behavioral profiling, the Israeli government has hardened their targets. While many believe the presence of armed security guards, metal detectors and regular law enforcement patrols around U.S. schools might frighten the children, unfortunately, these measures have become necessary to protect them in today’s America. And it’s certainly far less frightening than what students at Robb Elementary witnessed last week.
Yigal Arbiv, who has trained law enforcement officers in the U.S., is responsible for security at the Tchernichovsky Junior High School in Netanya, Israel. He told Fox it is essential for the “head of security [for a school] be given authorization” for all aspects of student and faculty safety.
Arbiv explained that “everyone who goes into the school needs to go through a metal detector, like at an airport, and sign his name.” He added that the “school has one exit and one entrance … nobody comes to the school without the head of security knowing about it. We do not allow people not connected to school to come inside.”
Additionally, the school employs a “spotter 50 meters from school” who patrols the area for potential security threats. Larger campuses require a guard to monitor the area on a motorcycle.
Moreover, security fencing encircles the school grounds and numerous cameras are positioned throughout the campus. Arbiv said they’ve also placed “barricades around the school, so people can’t drive into it.”
The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, is the equivalent of the FBI in the U.S. Arbiv said this agency’s highly trained agents “have different, sophisticated ways of collecting intelligence from artificial intelligence and cyber.”
Brig. Gen. (Res.) Amir Avivi, the founder and CEO of the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF) NGO, told Fox his group is working with the country’s Border Police and Police to recruit a voluntary force to keep Israelis safe. Avivi said, “We need something like 100,000 volunteers. Every journey starts with the first step. The prime minister is talking about 30,000. We think it needs to go faster. This is the discussion we are having with the government and the lessons from the riots last year should have been learned faster. We definitely need to reallocate more budgets to the Border Police and volunteers.”
“They will be trained and equipped by Border Police officers and will operate in various areas, including in schools,” Avivi noted. This initiative is an “example of how civil society can help government institutions provide security,” he said.
The cliche “necessity is the mother of all invention” arguably applies more to the Jewish state than any other country. From the moment Israel declared its independence in 1948, its sovereignty has been under attack. Because the country has been forced into a perpetual state of defense, Israelis have become experts in counterterrorism techniques.
Israel’s impressive track record in minimizing school shootings is something Americans should study and seek to emulate. Are some of these methods drastic? Yes. But they are also essential.
These attacks are occurring with increasing frequency in the U.S. How many more Americans have to die unnecessarily before we wake up and realize the world has changed and that we must adapt?
The time has come to harden our targets.
A previous version of this article was published on The Western Journal.
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Spot on! Unless one is evil, child safety just be one of the few things the left and right can agree upon. It appears that if we have the will, we can begin do things to bolster school safety / security. I’d rather see the feds ‘invest’ in school safety / security than bundle and distribute crack pipes.
I’d rather see the federal government stay as far away from doing anything more to our children. In other words, leave the crack pipes and this up to the states. This is not a federal issue, at all.
How good does any federal government bureaucracy perform, at anything, right now, or any time in the past? do you want the federal government doing one more thing that they can’t do well, when they have such an illustrious history of doing things bad?
What we have is not a plague of school shootings, but a plague of bad people who are willing to to do harm to others, and egged on by social media, the mainstream media, and all is the product of a terrible school system, teaching terrible curricula, and parents not being very good parents.
If we derail the 2nd Amendment over the shootings that have taken place, all we will have accomplished is stop future purchases of firearms, to good people because the bad ones will still be able to get their hands on a firearm.
The problem is a cultural one led by social media and the changing mores of society in our country, brought on by the left making it harder for a kid to grow up learning what it is they need to learn, and instead, learn about stuff they should never learn, like Critical Race Theory, and how a boy should wear a dress.
Sure, harden the school and protect the students from the criminal, but that doesn’t mean start some fantastical online internet database that could, and would be further used against everyone in the fight to take firearms away from everyone.
Saying it is the firearm’s fault will go nowhere, but ban firearms.
Correct our culture! Harden the target, but do something about the problem, and that is the culture.