I was telling a weapon-loving (and drug-loving, but that’s another story) friend of mine during the summer back in the USA what Israel is like, and he was very interested in the fact that guns are everywhere. The idea of soldiers with heavy weapons all over the place made him somewhat uneasy, but he loved the idea that random civilians can just be packin’ heat with a pistol on their belt and it’s considered perfectly normal (as long as they have a permit, of course).
He decided it might be a good idea to try and copy the Israeli system and somehow try to apply it in the USA. Of course, the reason so many Israelis are trusted by their government to carry weapons is probably the fact that they’ve gone through a few years of military training and discipline, but my friend thought that some kind of mandatory(? don’t remember for sure) self-defense and weapons responsibility training could be a good idea to get the American “few guns, lots of gun violence” situation to more of an Israeli “lots of guns, little gun violence” situation.
Of course, he did admit that the *reason* so many Israeli civilians pack heat is not a price that he would want to pay for his imagined responsible weapon-loving society.