Last week, Daniel Haiken, a young resident of Nesher, was murdered. Haiken delivered pizzas for a local shop. On Monday night, he returned from a delivery straight into an armed robbery in the pizzeria. The robbers shot him, grabbed some money, and escaped.
Apparently, nobody – not the pizzeria owner, not Daniel, not the customers and not passers-by – had a gun with which to defend themselves from the robbers.
What would happen if more citizens who met basic criteria – for example, anybody who had a license to carry a gun in the army – walked around armed? Would Daniel Haiken be alive today?
Probably.
A titanic struggle is being waged between the proponents of liberty and the proponents of servitude in Israel and throughout the world. The path to servitude is strewn with calls for us to deposit more and more of our liberties in the hands of the state (and to deposit the state in the hands of one oligarchy or another). In this way, parents of school aged children, for example, were convinced to deposit the education of their children in the hands of the state. For if we, heaven forefend, leave the children’s education to their parents, children will obviously just loiter in the streets.
Now they explain to us that if we allow citizens to bear weapons for self-defense, they will all kill each other. For that reason, they say, we must confiscate all weapons and allow the state to save us from ourselves.
In the days when liberty was the guiding light of America’s Founding Fathers, the authors of the U.S. Constitution were careful to include the right to bear arms as a basic right. The forces of servitude are trying to change that. That is nothing new – the first thing that any dictatorship does is to confiscate guns from the citizens.
What would have happened in Nesher if Israel was a truly liberty-oriented state and the right to bear arms was a basic right for every upstanding citizen? First of all, the robbers would clearly have thought twice about embarking on their dangerous venture. Today, unfortunately, the armed people in Israel are mainly criminals and people hostile to Israel. Regular citizens must wait for the police. In other words, the existing situation affords a huge advantage to the bad guys and encourages crime.
Even if the robbers would have decided to go ahead with their crime, the chance that Daniel or any passer-by could have dealt with the situation with no harm to innocents would have been much greater.
The state’s ardor to limit the amount of licensed guns in public hands has nothing to do with protecting us. When a wave of terror breaks out, the heads of the police publicly call for all licensed gun owners to carry their weapons. They know that the police cannot be in every place at all times. The state’s will to limit the amount of guns in public hands stems from its natural will to amplify its power at the expense of the public.
Daniel probably paid for that with his life.