The practicalities of arming synagouges

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While subject to debate this post is going by the assumption that having armed guards or congregants is deterrent or a minimizer of loss of life and injuries.

At first glance hiring armed guards seems affordable. That temple that was shot up looked nice and is in a middle to upper class area. Those who were killed were mostly elderly. That is indictative of a decades long trend in many religions in America of people relying less on houses of worship for thier religious and social life. Everybody is too busy to go to temple or church or temple these days for one thing. If most of your congragation is on fixed income there is only so much they can give financially. If a temple hires armed guards especially quality ones that is at best going to mean elimiting some very important programs if they are affordable at all. They have ask themselves is the price of eliminating good programs and maintenance worth preventing the very low chance they will attacked by a mass shooter. True low risk means hiring 24/7 security to prevent vandalism and bombs which is more expensive.

No place has ever been as remotly safe and prosperous for Jews as America. Even at our worst with quotas and gentelmens agreements and Father Coughlin’s American Jews have never faced the type of systematic goverment approvel of anti semitism Jews in the diaspora have faced nearly every time and every place including in Europe today. That this was the deadliest attack against Jews in American history says something good about America not bad. Lets assume that Pittsburgh portends the end of the past half century of almost nirvana for American Jews, that others will be enabled to attack. The risk any one particular congregation will be seroiusly attacked still seems very low. Pittsburgh has brought pledges of support from goverments and other religions and ordinary people. So the question remains is a sense of security and actual horrific consequences if your congregation is unlucky enough to be attacked worth the price?

What about armed congregants? Those congregants need to be both qualified and regularly come to services. Jews for the most part are not a gun culture. There are Jews that are part of it but they are outliers. A half century ago there was the Jewish Defence League that started out patrolling Jewish neighborhoods, guarding temples etc before they morphed into a terrorist group. There has been nothing remotly like them since. Jews tend to live urban and suburban areas where gun culture is not prevalent. My dad as was a officer of an NRA chapter comprised of all Jews. It was target practice for sport. They were vehemently anti gun control. Outside the immediate family nobody but nobody was allowed to see his collection because he knew others even distant relatives and many his friends many Jewish would be horrified by visual evidence of his hobby. So where are the reliable armed congregants going to come from?

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 30 Oct 2018, 11:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'm sure they will if they aren't already. But this is a sign of failure. There is no religious freedom when we have to fear constant attack.

I'm from England, so when I heard Trump on the news saying they should have armed guards at places of worship it really hit me hard how in some places in America you literally can't imagine a society without guns because it is so ingrained. Why was that his first thought on the way forward?

It's both mind-boggling and horrifying at the same time that their is even a debate about public access to firearms in the US.

I'm not saying it's rational (since a bullet can be more damaging or more lethal than a knife. Not necessarily though), but I have to say hearing of the knife violence in the UK is very scary to me. Maybe it rarely happens and to the average UK citizen it's a non-issue and perhaps the media blows it out of proportion? What I mean is, perhaps in reality, knife violence is nearly nonexistent in the UK but the media makes it out to be more than it is to sensationalize?

I’d rather be shot then stabbed especially stabbed multiple times. Stabbing is horrible. And the. There’s the decapitations.

Of course there are parts of England that have their issues, London being the most publicized one, but most of the time as long as you're not silly about your safety (i.e. A woman walking alone at night, walking down dark alleyways in rough areas, etc) you're pretty much as safe as you can be, even in London.

Some US media outlets DEFINITELY over-exaggerate it, in my opinion, to scare people into keeping their guns. Correct me if I'm wrong but some people in the US have this image of London being a gang-filled crime city where people are stabbed to death on every street corner? That could not be further from the truth. That's not even mentioning that the Police forces across the UK are in a shambles because of the years of austerity we've been tolerating, so you'd expect crime to be up anyway.

All in all I can't begin to fathom why some Americans feel the need to keep hold of their guns even in the face of now regular mass shootings. Just objectively compare the two weapons and, for me, it's so easy to see that a gun (even a semi-automatic) is so much more dangerous than a knife.

Thank you for your input. I appreciate it since I'm not "over there", it's good to get a perspective from someone who actually is.

I find one way to get a general sense of how things are in reality is to ask an individual questions specific to the issue at hand. Can you answer the following?

- Have you yourself been a victim of or been threatened by knife crime?
- Do you know of anyone directly who has been a victim of or has been threatened by knife crime?
- Do you know of anyone who in turn knows of someone directly who has been a victim of or been threatened by knife crime?

It's nice to see someone actively looking to educate themselves on the topic, so thank you for asking the question.

Of course my experience isn't indicative of the whole country, especially since I have spent the majority of my life in relatively crime-free areas, but I'm sure all you have to do is look up the crime stats to get a good idea of the issue.

This is from the ONS, the go to place for stats in the UK:
"The latest figures for police recorded offences involving a knife or sharp instrument can be found in Table 9a of the year ending September 2015 statistical bulletin. There were a total of 27,487 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument that were recorded by the police in the year ending September 2015. Of these offences, 188 (less than 1%) were homicides and 27,299 were made up of other selected offences such as attempted murder and threats to kill." Linked here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transpar ... knifecrime

I encourage you to seek similar statistics for gun violence in the US, but even after accounting for the greater population of the US I believe it would come out as a greater problem than UK knife crime

As to your question:
-No
-No
-No, although memory may fail me here

Thanks for the info. I'd be curious to see how the stats may have changed since 2015 as to whether the rate of knife crime has increased or decreased.

Your answers to those three questions also helps to put things in perspective and not run through the filter of media.

My personal experiences with gun crime are definitely not typical of the average U.S. citizen's experience since I have been a direct victim of gun crime on two separate and unrelated instances more than twenty years apart. By direct victim, I mean in both cases, someone shooting directly at me. In the first instance, with a pistol and in the second, a shotgun.

I would say based on being born in the U.S. and living her all of my life that the vast majority of U.S. citizens, would answer "no" to the three questions I posed to you if "knife" was replaced with "gun" in each of the three questions.

Wow, I can't even imagine how terrifying that must've been. The issue for me though is the fear that guns must cause to local communities who suffer from a gun-related crime. Surely, if guns were totally banned and the tragedy in Pittsburgh had occurred with a knife instead of a gun, the community would feel much safer than they currently do. What do you think?

I think the UK and The U.S. are different in many ways including population, size and history. No one knows an exact figure, but if I recall correctly it's believed there are hundreds of millions of guns in the U.S. It would be literally impossible to arrive at an accurate number. Up until perhaps the last 30-40 years there was no such thing as a background check and there isn't a formal gun registry. I don't want to go off topic and turn this into a gun control debate, but even if guns were banned, all guns, to the point of law enforcement literally going door to door and searching each citizen's premises and seizing their guns, it would be naive for anyone to think that all guns would be removed from the citizenry, both the law abiding and the criminal. It would be more probable that millions of guns would still be held by the citizenry and most of them by the criminal element that does not abide by laws no matter the penalty.

Most of the land mass in the U.S. is rural and is not protected by municipal law enforcement. Instead, law enforcement for rural areas is typically under the jurisdiction of a sheriff's department. The sheriff's jurisdiction is an entire county. There are no "police stations" in close proximity to a rural citizen's home. If a rural citizen is met in their home with a person/person's intent on doing them harm, even if the "911" (emergency) is called immediately, it can be 10 minutes on the quick end, to 30 minutes or longer for law enforcement to respond. It's not hyperbole to say that rural citizens are very often "on their own" to defend their lives in those kinds of situations; no "person down the hall" to scream for help to. The majority of citizens in the U.S. support the "right to bear arms" for reasons such as protection of themselves and/or their family. The vast majority of citizens who do own firearms never take them away from/out of their home.

Last edited by Magna on 30 Oct 2018, 8:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I hadn't even thought of the practicalities of actually following through the ban and seizing weapons across the country, that would cost the government billions for years to come. Indeed though, we shouldn't stray from the topic.