“We can either live in a paranoid politically correct world frantically trying not to offend the Hitlers and Mohammeds, and blaming their victims when they kill, or we can be free men and women who have chosen to take the power to defend our rights into our own hands.

While a thousand organizations use the Holocaust as a platform for speeches about tolerance, Children Of Jewish Holocaust Survivors [Jews Can Shoot] is conducting firearms training… Freedom is not defended with empty idealism easily perverted into appeasement of evil, but with the force of arms.”

All too many of the other great tragedies of history - Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few - were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece... If a few hundred Jewish fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
Silveira v. Lockyer, 2003

Habah l'hargecha hashkem l'hargo -- "If someone is coming to kill you, rise against him and kill him first."

Commentary

What Israel Learned From October 7 That America Still Hasn’t Learned From 9/11

by Doris Wise Montrose on January 6, 2026

Before this turns into an argument about Israeli gun laws—read carefully.

Yes, Israel has restrictive firearms policies.
I don’t like them either.
But turning this article into a lecture about what Israel should do according to American standards misses the point entirely.

Israel is not America.
Different constitution. Different legal culture. Different assumptions about the role of the state and the citizen.

What matters here is what changed after October 7.

October 7 was a catastrophic intelligence failure.
So was 9/11.

By Doris Wise

Military Gun Training in Polish Schools

"All too many of the other great tragedies of history—Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few—were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. ... If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars." — Silveira v Lockyer, (9th Cir. 2003) (Kozinski, J. dissenting.)

What Israel Learned From October 7 That America Still Hasn’t Learned From 9/11

Training vs. Conditioning: The Subconscious Impact of Target Design

Military Gun Training in Polish Schools