V17

Actually no. Self-defense + concealed carry is allowed in Baltic states as well and home defense (=no concealed carry) is also allowed in Italy and Austria.

It’s just guns for self-defense, isn’t a thing.

Not really, it is a thing in Switzerland and Czechia for example.

And even outside of that, not every country has laws as strict as Germany or UK.

Czechia: To get a gun for self-defense, you need to get a permit, which includes mandatory training, tests and a psychological evaluation (which, from what I’ve heard, is not hard to get). You need to have a clean criminal record and they check your misdemeanors too (you may not be allowed to get a permit if you’ve had issues with public drunkenness for example). However, after that you can not only buy a gun but also are automatically allowed to concealed carry.

There are several types of permits and getting a permit for sports or hunting is slightly easier. You need to be 21 years old to get a self-defense permit, you can get a hunting or sports permit when you’re 18 or in special situations (used under supervision) when you’re 15. The permits last 10 years, but you can lose them if you get a criminal record. The gun permit registry is managed by the state police, so it’s easy for them to check the validity of your license if they need to do so.

Gun violence is very rare, so I’m happy with this and see no reason to change it. The people that I know who have a permit (it’s quite uncommon) are very responsible with it.

There are restrictions on which weapons a civilian can buy. No automatic weapons for sure, but I think you can get some semi-automatic guns with a suppressor (cause I’ve heard a guy recommending one such gun with sub-sonic ammo for potential home-defense, stating “if I really have to use it, there’s no reason why my family should go deaf in the process”, heh).

Again though, my point is that Hamas as an entity wouldn’t exist if Palestinians were considered regular citizens and not forced off from their own property.

This may be true and it would be good to consider this when deciding what to do after Hamas is gone, but it doesn’t change anything about current situation. The fact is that thinking a military checkpoint would filter out terrorists is incredibly naive, and whether Israel cares about the lives of civilians or not likely wouldn’t change this particular issue at all.

The people IDF is targeting are Hamas leaders or “officers”, who need to communicate a lot and sometimes even show in public, so they can be tracked with enough time. Boots on the ground soldiers are a completely different problem and Israel doesn’t even have the resources to track all of them because there are so many. How is that not obvious??

You are extremely naive if you think that a military checkpoint would solve this problem. Egypt was not able to stop Hamas terrorists and their supplies going back and forth through the Rafah border crossing to commit acts of terror in the Sinai peninsula for example. And that was during “business as usual”, not in a situation where potentially hundreds of thousands of people would likely have to go through.

Radical kindness will specifically tell Hamas “yes, brutal terrorist attacks work, keep doing them”. That is unfortunately not an option. It’s also just a fantasy because it would understandably never be supported by Israeli population for this reason.

I’m interested in seeing alternative solutions that could actually work and be realistically implemented, but outside of understandable positions like “ease off with the fucking bombing and do more work on the ground” that don’t change the goal of what is being done I have not seen any.

You have a point, but it’s not really the same thing and there’s a very good recent counter-example too. ISIS was effectively dealt with despite being spread out over a much larger area. Taliban won, but it had a whole huge country to work in and was nowhere near as violent as Hamas, so it had more support. Gaza is tiny in comparison, blocked on all sides and neighbors of Israel don’t want anything to do with them either, even if they don’t like Israel. There is also at least some alternative in Fatah, which didn’t lose the 2005 elections by that much.

Imo it’s clearly possible to get rid of Hamas, though I’m not making any claims about the probability that it will happen.

Mostly, I don’t really see an alternative. Some radical action needed to be taken because anything else would be interpreted as a clear proof that large terrorist attacks against civilians work, and Hamas should continue committing them. You cannot appease someone whose reason for existence is violence. And keeping Hamas sort of in check, only killing or capturing the worst terrorists, which is what was being done in the last two decades, clearly did not work either.

I agree that it would be better for the Palestinians, clearly Israeli Arabs have better lives than people in Gaza and West Bank despite also facing some discrimination, but Gazans would never agree to this (that is clear from public opinion polls done by PA institutions - for example over 70% of people in Gaza support violence against Israeli civilians), so the end result would be exactly the same is this one. You would still have an army of violent murderers hiding in tunnels with almost two decades of preparation for exactly this.

If Israel wanted to kill all people in Gaza, they could just carpet bomb them without ever stepping a foot in. The only reason to do a ground invasion that will inevitably bring a ton of Israeli casualties is to reduce civilian deaths.

Do you honestly not see the problem with letting out at the very least tens of thousands of people, possibly hundreds of thousands, and guarding them all well enough so that none of them can do any hostilities that can be done without smuggling arms out of Gaza (whether it’s sabotage, inciting violent protests to keep the IDF occupied or terrorist acts using weapons smuggled into Israel from elsewhere)?

Your right, best to kill them all then.

Where did you get that?

What do you agree with btw?

I’m not happy with what Israel is doing. But I don’t know of a better way to get rid of Hamas either. And I’m convinced that if we want a free Palestine and a working two state solution, freeing it from Hamas has to be the first step without which no sustainable situation with Israel can ever be achieved.

This isn’t so much a war as it is a mass execution.

The rocket attacks may be, but the ground operation in Gaza is going to be anything but. There’s going to be a lot of casualties on Israeli side before this is over and the first waves of wounded soldiers started coming into hospitals around Gaza right on the evening when the invasion started.

If that’s the case why won’t Israel let civilians cross the border into Israel to prevent their murder?

Whether you agree with Israeli attacks or not, obviously the answer to this is because it’s impossible to filter out Hamas terrorists, which is the main thing they’re trying to prevent.

No idea why you’re downvoted, this is objectively true. One may consider it disgusting or morally indefensible, but a) unless Israel is lying about the presence of legitimate targets in the area it is not illegal b) using civilians as human shields is a staple Hamas tactic.

That is actually how it works. It is not against international law to strike civilian areas if it cannot be avoided in order to attack military targets. It needs to be done in a manner appropriate to the situation, for which there is obviously no hard line defined. Assuming that Israel is not lying regarding the military target around/under the location of this strike (which they probably aren’t, because murdering civilians without reason hurts their interests), it is explicitly legal without any loopholes or weird interpretations.

I wonder how the Jews of Europe would have responded if the worlds response was “Well we’re not really sure we consider this a genocide. Lets wait a year or two and see how this shakes out.”

That is not what I said or meant. You keep misinterpreting my words to fit in your view of “anybody who disagrees with me has to be malicious”. That is not how reality works.

You are a coward and a sorry creature. Its terrible what happened to Israel due to Hamas. But it in NO WAY justifies any course of action that Israel has since taken. Do better.

You seem to be so convinced by only exposing yourself to completely one-sided views that you cannot even imagine that someone could disagree with you without being evil. You did not respond to most things I said in this discussion and now you’re calling me names. You’re the one who should “do better”, as useless as the phrase is.

Meh. I could literally say the same to you. I repeated what you said in an ironic manner, but I was serious about it. But it’s not like our argument has any influence on the real world anyway, so we’ll see how the situation develops in a year or two.

They can use special ops.

If they could, they would have already done so.

They can appeal to the Palestinian people.

They’re doing that as well, but thinking that this would solve the situation is LOL, LMAO even.

They can revise their foreign policy to not set these situations up in the first place (see the previous 20 years of Israeli policy towards Palestine).

I see we’re getting back to “well they should have done xxxx”. Israel stopped the occupation of Gaza and let them have free elections to govern themselves. As a result Hamas with a stated goal of destroying Israel won and started doing terrorists attacks on towns around Gaza. So Israel built a wall. So maybe Palestinians can revisit their foreign policy towards Israel (see the previous 20 years of Palestinian policy towards Israel).

They arent’ targeting Hamas, they are targeting any Palestinian with a pulse.

Again, if they did that, they would have been levelling Gaza to the ground without risk to their soldiers, they have the resources to do so. They announced in advance that they will do an assault on northern Gaza to give civilians the chance to leave and go south for now, and even if they initially gave them ridiculously short 24 hours, the actual time given was days longer than that. Only, a large part of the civilians were prevented from doing so… Not by the IDF, but by Hamas, wanting to use them as human shields as usual.

Right now, you are acting as an apologist for a genocide and you should seriously reconsider your position. It will not age well.

Right now, you are acting as an apologist for a monstrous terrorist attack and you should seriously reconsider your position. It will not age well.

If Israel actually commits genocide, I will change my position. So far that does not seem to be the case.

Israel is a powerful nation with all the options they can imagine on the table. If they can’t imagine another option then that’s on them.

You say that, but I don’t see any other way to remove the Hamas threat than what they’re doing. Is your argument just “Israel is all-powerful and they should find a different way even if we don’t see any!”?

are you making the argument that the correct response to a terrorist attack is to genocide the people where the terrorists are based?

What? I’m mentioning Grozny. Have you heard about Grozny? If you haven’t, maybe I understand how you could interpret my message in that way, though I still don’t think it makes sense. In the second Chechen war, this is what Grozny looked like after Russia was finished with it, most likely on false pretenses (putin faking appartment bombings around Russia and blaming it on Chechens). They simply turned it to rubble.

Israel could do this and get away with it just like Russia did, and their reasons for attacking Hamas are more serious than reasons Russians had to attack Chechnya. Instead of doing that they chose to do a ground invasion, which will reduce the loss of civilian lives and infrastructure, despite the fact that it will dramatically increase the casualties on Israeli side.

That is not genocide, that is deciding to avoid genocide in a situation where they could likely get away with it.