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An instructor performs a demonstration during a training session at a shooting range in Kfar Saba, Israel
Gunned Down, Gunned Up, Again
As news broke last night of the horrific mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, where at least 18 people have been killed, I happened to be talking about guns with an old friend from Israel.
As the Israel-Hamas war rages on, my friend has joined a local security detail where he and other volunteers patrol their local streets at night. Hundreds of these new security units – they are essentially militias – are springing up as Israelis of all ages (my friend is in his early 60s) rush to protect their country. You might think this civic volunteerism is a positive sign, but my friend, a former politician, had a strikingly different view.
“I’m not sure if this is a sign of strength or a sign of weakness in our country,” he said. “After all, it should be the job of police and the government to keep people safe, but no one trusts the government to do that anymore, so they are doing it themselves.” It is an interesting question: Is gun ownership a metric of trust in government?
A recent poll from the Israel Democracy Institute shows that only 20% of Israelis and 7.5% of Arab Israelis trust the Netanyahu government. That lack of trust, intensified by the colossal Oct. 7 security failure, has led to a spike in militias and in Israelis buying guns.
You might think Israel has lax gun laws given that it has mandatory military service for most people, but actually, there are rigorous protections. There is no US-style Second Amendment right, and permits and checks are required. Still, it’s not hard to get a gun permit, and even before the Oct. 7 attack, the Netanyahu government was seeking to loosen the rules. Now that looks to be accelerating.
The instinctive rush to bear arms in the wake of an attack is understandable, but it can have long-term consequences, as the US knows all too well. The idea after the American Revolution was that armed citizens could save the country from tyranny. Yet, gun-toting Americans pose other grave dangers: The Maine tragedy was the 565th mass shooting in the US this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The renewed debate over gun control will likely, as ever, stall. Why? Lack of trust in government is a key factor.
A recent Pew Research study showed that less than 20% of Americans trust the US government, among the lowest numbers seen since polling began in 1958.
The same lack of trust is true in the UK and increasingly so in Canada as well, which makes combatting big issues, like gun violence or, say, a pandemic, harder to coordinate.
Just this week in Canada, the official opposition, which is polling way ahead of Trudeau’s government, put forward an anti-vaccine mandate bill to stop future governments from forcing federal workers and travelers to take a vaccine. Even though the measure was defeated, it is a sign that a huge part of the country does not trust the government to protect it from disease. What will it mean for a future pandemic?
Trust is something any government needs to build. That requires transparency, effective policies, and, at a bare minimum, doing its job to protect citizens’ rights and their security. If you lose those, garnering support for any other policy – health, climate, education – becomes a helluva lot harder. An armed-up, amped-up, distrustful population doesn’t make for social cohesion.
It’s also a sign of the dangers of short-term, impulsive political thinking, the hallmark of so many crises. One result, as my friend wisely pointed out, is not realizing that sometimes overt signs of strength – an armed citizenry, for example – can actually be signs of weakness. It is the very point facing Israel’s entire strategy in Gaza.
Understandably stung by the Oct. 7 terror attack, Benjamin Netanyahu has launched a massive counterattack to wipe out Hamas, but that has come with the collective punishing of the people of Gaza and, soon, a ground offensive. What is his long-term strategic goal for a post-Hamas Gaza? Who will govern it? How can the hostages be rescued? All of these questions remain dangerously unclear.
Israel’s prime minister is clearly trying to reestablish the doctrine of deterrence – showing the region that attacking the Jewish state will lead to massive consequences – but then what? Where does that lead in terms of a two-state solution and some kind of peace? No one in Israel, let alone outside of it, trusts Netanyahu to get there anymore.
Over-indexing on deterrence today can mean under-indexing on security tomorrow.
That is one lesson from Israel for the US and Canada. Distrust in government makes societies most vulnerable not only to potential threats but to the urgent need to respond effectively to them. We all just saw this over the past few weeks in the US, where distrust among Republicans led to chaos in electing a House Speaker, jeopardizing everything from the functioning of the government to aid to Ukraine.
The hunt for solutions to dangerous threats keeps getting harder, especially when you don’t trust the hunter.Map showing gun deaths by US state from 2020-2023.
The Graphic Truth: Gun deaths from mass shootings in the US
It’s America’s recurring nightmare. On Monday, a disgruntled bank employee used an AR-15 rifle he’d purchased locally the week before to murder five colleagues and injure eight others in Louisville, Kentucky. There have been more mass shootings, 147, than there have been days so far in 2023. We look at the death tolls from 2,000 mass shootings in the US since 2020 by state.
Boris Johnson is going to be out, one way or the other
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60:
First, will Boris Johnson step down?
I certainly think it is getting likely. He's going to be out, one way or the other. The question is, is it as a result of a second in one month no-confidence vote that he loses this time around, or he reads the writing on the wall, knows he's going to get voted out and so decides to resign himself. If you made me bet, I think he's going to resign, but he might well just force them to do it. He's lost… a majority of conservative voters in the United Kingdom now want Boris Johnson to step down. He's had scandal after scandal after scandal, lied, been caught lying about so many of those scandals, and it's just a disaster, frankly. While the economy's doing badly, while Brexit has not played out the way he said it would, this is a man that has well passed his sell-by date and I don't expect he will be there as prime minister for much longer.
Secondly, with Beijing rolling out China's first vaccine mandate, how soon will China ease its lockdowns?
Not soon enough. This is a big mistake for the Chinese. They're the one country in the world, of course, that had no problem, at scale, doing lockdowns and surveillance for their population and yet they didn't bother with vaccine mandates, and they should have, especially for older populations, especially for vulnerable populations. This mandate is only in Beijing. It's not hitting restaurants. It's just hitting a bunch of other public venues. It's not hitting public transportation. It will matter for Beijing, but it's not enough. They need to be much more extensive around the country before they're going to be able to start loosening zero-COVID policy. I think we're still looking at early to mid next year at the earliest.
Is the United States the only developed country struggling with mass shootings?
Yeah, nobody else close than the United States, and the US is the only country that has assault type weapons that are so easily accessible in the hands of its population. That is the fundamental policy difference between the United States and Canada, between the US and Australia, between the US and Japan, the US and the Europeans. If you look at all of these different countries, they all have various amounts of mental illness, they have different amounts of economic inequality, they have different amounts of racial challenges than the rest. The United States is the one where you have all of this gun violence. Yes, a lot of the gun violence isn't mass shootings. A lot of it is, frankly, in inner cities. It's poor, it's overwhelmingly Black in the United States, but it's with guns. And if you look at how many people are killed through violence and it's not with guns, it's a tiny fraction of that. And so if you had more effective background checks on who's able to get guns, if you had effective checks on assault weapons, assault type weapons, it would be a very different story in the US. The US is very significantly struggling with it and is doing absolutely nothing to make a difference.
After the Buffalo shooting: gun violence and US polarization
Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, discusses Washington's response to the Buffalo shooting.
How is Washington responding to the Buffalo shooting?
Multiple mass shootings this weekend were quickly picked up by partisans on both sides who filtered them through purely political lenses. And notably those lenses ended up being about something other than gun control. Sadly, gun violence has become so common in the United States that the shootings that generate national news coverage tend to be those that fit, that can be most easily politicized. There have been at least 200 incidents involving four or more victims so far in 2022, and these shootings will not move the needle on policies that could prevent them and it's notable that so few politicians are even trying at this point. The national media response tends to see more significance in the political context of the shooting than in the shooting itself.
For example, a number of mainstream outlets and journalists focused on a manifesto left behind by the white supremacist who killed 10 people in Buffalo, New York, and immediately linked it to conspiratorial views from the far-right fringe of conservative politics and media. In contrast, conservatives and social media drew attention to street violence in Chicago and Milwaukee as proof that Democratic cities are overrun by crime due to lax policing policy and mismanagement. Meanwhile, yet another mass shooting at a predominantly Asian church in Southern California went largely unnoticed due to its lack of fit in political narratives.
It almost goes without saying that there's little hope for legislation that would respond to any of these shootings anytime soon. This is yet another intractable political issue in the United States with roots in constitutional law. And in fact, one watchpoint for the year is a potential Supreme Court case involving concealed carry regulations in New York that could potentially be a massive setback for gun restrictions nationwide, which will become yet another cultural flashpoint over a deeply polarizing issue.