No Comparison Between Israel Terrorist Attacks on Schools and US School Attacks

No Comparison Between Israel Terrorist Attacks on Schools and US School Attacks

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/israelis-shoot-nra-claim-article-1.1226401

Israelis shoot down NRA's claim that the Jewish State uses more weapons to keep schools safe

In recent years, restrictions on gun ownership in Israel have been tightened, not relaxed.

When it comes to Israel and school shootings, Wayne LaPierre doesn’t know what he’s talking about, Israeli security experts said Sunday.

Such shootings are very rare in Israel and have been associated with terror attacks, not crazed gunmen, they said.

Appearing on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, NRA honcho LaPierre said: “Israel had a whole lot of school shootings, until they did one thing. They said we’re going to stop it and they put armed security in every school and they have not had a problem since then.”

But Yigal Palmor, spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said the situation in Israel was “fundamentally different” from that in the United States.

“We didn’t have a series of school shootings, and they had nothing to do with the issue at hand in the United States. We had to deal with terrorism,” said Palmor.

“There is no comparison between maniacs with psychological problems opening fire at random to kill innocent people and trained terrorists trying to murder Israeli children,” said Reuven Berko, a retired Israeli Army colonel and senior police officer.

..

“Israeli citizens are not allowed to carry guns unless they are serving in the army or working in security-related jobs that require them to use a weapon,” said Berko.

The worst attack on an Israeli school was in 1974, when terrorists from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine took 115 people hostage in a school in Maalot in northern Israel. Twenty-five people were killed as Israeli commandos stormed the building, 22 of them children.

“The attempt to compare the two tragedies is absurd,” said Prof. Gerald Steinberg of Bar-Ilan University. “Palestinian terror attacks like one one at Maalot — the goal of which was to use the children as hostages in order to free other terrorists — are totally different from crimes committed by deranged people with guns.”

Read more: 
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/israelis-shoot-nra-claim-article-1.1226401#ixzz2j7lObs2N