From Philadelphia's The Inquirer:
Why Philly Jews are arming themselves: ‘I’m going to go down fighting’
On Friday afternoon, with just a few hours before sundown and the start of the Sabbath, David Parvey hurried to a South Philadelphia gun shop called Firing Line to get his new 9-millimeter pistol.
To Parvey, who attends an Orthodox Jewish synagogue in Center City, it felt like the only rational response to the Oct. 27 mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where 11 congregants were killed.
"I legally have the right to at least be able to match evil with some sort of response, and in my mind I would be dumb not to," said Parvey, who on Wednesday went to the Philadelphia Police Department's Gun Permit Unit to apply for a concealed-carry license. "I don't want to hide behind the bimah waiting for my turn to get shot."
Parvey is not the only one to reach this conclusion. A simmering conversation about safety in the face of anti-Semitic violence that began several years ago with attacks on Jewish targets in France — a yeshiva in Toulouse, a kosher supermarket and the Bataclan theater in Paris — has boiled over in the last week. While some are responding with prayer and peaceful protests, there are those who feel that a pistol is just more reliable.
Good news - people standing up for themselves and their friends. Seconds count in a shooting and the police are minutes away at very best.
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