Double Life – Weapons

By Daniela Fubini*

When I did my pilot in Israel in the summer of 2006, and the country was at war with Lebanon, I remember that I felt a bit uncomfortable when I was sitting on a bus and across me or at my side I had a cold and shiny barrel of rifle, usually owned by a sleepy youngster – maximum age: 25. No, actually the IDF owned the rifle or whatever other thing that can spit fire and kill, but that didn’t matter too much. My concern was to try and keep my body outside of the line of fire: you never know.

There were soldiers everywhere, always in full uniform, travelling in any direction and always with a weapon on them. All that display of weapons was part of being at war naturally, and I remember thinking that in my almost four years in America, possibly the heaviest armed country on the planet, I had not once seen a weapon (besides on police officers and similar, naturally). Right, I lived in Manhattan, and not in the midwest. And the US were at war at the time, but the war was overseas. Still. Then I got used and now when – much less often than in 2006 – a soldier commuting on my morning train falls asleep with his weapon pressing on my leg. I make sure I don’t move too much so I don’t wake up the young man (or woman, sometimes they are women): no other thoughts cross my mind.

But every single time that a terrorist in the US breaks into a school or an office or a party, or a synagogue like this past Shabbat, my first thought is: regular people who are not soldiers fighting to protect their country should really not be given guns. Ever. It’s plain and simple, but Americans just don’t get it, and so a Neo-Nazi can freely shift from tweets to murder and the innocents die.

*Daniela Fubini (Twitter @d_fubini) lives and writes in Israel, where she arrived in 2008 from Turin via New York.