Times of Israel..
17 December '12..
Israel, a country that often appears to be inundated with weapons, actually extends very few gun permits to civilians — only 2.5 percent of the population can legally carry a firearm. But those who are licensed to carry a weapon have proved capable of acting swiftly and effectively time and again to neutralize attackers during acts of terrorism.
“In 40-50 cases over the past 10 years, armed Israeli citizens have intervened during terror attacks,” said Dr. Shlomo Shapiro, a senior research fellow at Bar-Ilan University’s BESA Center and the author of a forthcoming paper on the armed Israeli civilian’s role in foiling terror attacks.
“In 70 percent of those cases, their intervention was crucial,” he said.
In the United States there are an estimated 280-300 million guns in the hands of some 47 percent of all Americans, according to a recent article in the Atlantic, meaning that close to half the population possesses an average of two firearms. Yet in the past several years some of the most gruesome public killings — including the 2012 theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and Friday’s massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 first-graders and six women were killed — ended with the suicide of a surrounded perpetrator rather than rapid intervention from armed civilians.
Although the divide is far from absolute, there can be several explanations for what seems to be a distinctive difference between the two groups of civilians.
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