Israeli school security methods could serve as a guide to prevent mass shootings

Democrats and the gun control lobby are working hard in the aftermath of the senseless shooting this week of elementary school children in Uvalde, Texas, to steer the national discussion away from a more attainable goal of securing schools to the point where a gunman cannot enter without great difficulty toward a grab for guns.

Seizing on the deaths of 19 children and two adults in much the same way they exploited George Floyd’s death to push their radical view that America is an inherently racist nation into the mainstream, the left employs tunnel vision to focus on the instrument of destruction over the person responsible or weaknesses in the system that enable such shootings to instead call for a ban on “assault weapons” and high capacity magazines.

And while school shootings are seen as primarily an American “thing,” Israel is no stranger to terrorist attacks on its population, yet since 1974 there have only been six attacks on schools, according to Fox News.

The network cites “multiple layers of security” and the “engagement of civil society in aiding the nation’s law enforcement. to explain the small number of attacks.

Israel “puts effort into identifying potential assailants through behavioral profiling,” David Hazony told Fox News.

A writer and commentator on Israeli and American affairs, Hazony has eleven children and he said Israel “invests heavily in monitoring profiles of people” because having armed security guards at each school is not enough on its own.

This “complex, multi-layered approach” to security employs intelligence networks to examine the acquisition of weapons and social media activity, he said.

Yigal Arbiv was responsible for security at an Israeli junior high school for 16 years and he told Fox News that it’s important that the “head of security [for a school] be given authorization to do everything” to provide safety for the children and staff.

Arbiv said the process he had in place included a “spotter 50 meters from school” who patrolled the area and visitors to the school “could only come from one direction. There was also fencing around the schools and cameras in place all over the facility and “barricades around the school, so people can’t drive into it,” he explained.

“Everyone who goes into the school needs to go through a metal detector, like at an airport, and sign his name,” Arbiv said, adding that the “school has one exit and one entrance… nobody comes to the school without the head of security knowing about it. We do not allow people not connected to school to come inside.”

Tom Tillison

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