Israelis learning how to shoot to survive

JERUSALEM - Looking every bit a Jewish grandmother, grey-haired Shifra Hoffman squeezed the trigger and fired a 9mm bullet into the throat of a paper assailant.

"We are not vigilantes," she said, wearing safety goggles and ear protectors at a Jerusalem shooting range, "but we see the Government is speaking and talking while, meanwhile, people are being shot."

Hoffman is founder of Victims of Arab Terror, a right-wing group that has long blasted interim peace accords with the Palestinians as a sham and urges ordinary Israelis to arm against the Arab foe.

More than 130 people, all but a handful of them Palestinians, have been killed in a month of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed, prompting the Government to declare a "time-out" on peacemaking.

With the Army girding for a long conflict amid nightly reports of shooting incidents on the edge of Jerusalem, Hoffman thought it prudent to take a crash course in the arts of semi-automatic weaponry.

"You don't shoot to kill. You shoot to survive," barked Steven Averbach, a trainer at the Krav shooting range, telling matronly pupils how to kneel behind a barricade when clearing a jammed weapon. Krav manager Ronen Rabani said sales of ammunition and weapons had risen tenfold since violence erupted on September 28.

"In the past three weeks we sold all the stock we had for the next three to five months," Rabani said.

Inventories were flying off the shelves across the country, and leading importers of foreign-made firearms "simply don't have weapons," he said. Some customers face waiting up to a month for new guns.

"Everybody wants to order a weapon, not just people who live on the other side of the Green Line," Rabani said, referring to Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza.

Israelis are flocking to sharpen their skills on the firing range and take first-time gun courses to apply for licences from the Government, a process that takes up to six weeks and requires security and mental health background checks.

Ruti Gordon, a Jerusalem native, shrugged her shoulders after pumping four bullets into the white and green torso of a paper target. One pierced the heart but a fifth went wide.

"It feels good," she said. "The Arabs want to wipe us out. Their kids are taught from a young age starting with stonings and then with weapons.

"The Army cannot be everywhere. We have to defend ourselves."

- REUTERS

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