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Israel-Gaza Megathread #1

This is a megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.

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I think that for Israeli Jews, trying to make it easier for citizens to own guns would put them between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, they would be loath to let ethnically Arab citizens of Israel have guns because that would make it much easier for those of them who want to kill Jews to actually do it.

On the other hand, there is no way to write a gun control law that takes ethnicity into account without making it completely obvious that you are running an ethno-state and thus looking really bad to a lot of people in the broader world.

On the other hand, there is no way to write a gun control law that takes ethnicity into account without making it completely obvious that you are running an ethno-state and thus looking really bad to a lot of people in the broader world.

Easier than you might think, and Israel is already doing it. To get a gun license in Israel you need to have completed a certain degree of military training (among other requirements). Non-Jews (Druze, Bedouins, some Christian Arabs) who serve in the IDF are not those that you need to worry about starting a riot at the behest of Hamas or Hezbollah.

On the other hand, there is no way to write a gun control law that takes ethnicity into account without making it completely obvious that you are running an ethno-state and thus looking really bad to a lot of people in the broader world.

But they are already running an ethno-state. No outsider considers it not to be an ethnic state unless they are making PR mouth noises pretending to the contrary.

,Yes, but bringing it to the arena of gun laws would take it up a notch and look particularly ugly because it basically would look like "we are going to make it legal for any of our random vigilantes and paramilitary groups to easily buy guns while at the same time we will ensure that it is illegal for the Palestinians to defend themselves from such violence".