One of the curious features of Israeli life is the way her young conscript soldiers carry their loaded M-4s, M-16s, and other automatic weapons everywhere they go. In uniform and out. It’s required.
You see them in the grocery, the mall, the bus stop, the street, heck, even in the elevator. Snoop and I were riding an elevator in a mall near his home in Rehovot when it stopped to let on two young black men, apparently Ethiopian Jews. Both were in uniform, and both were fully armed.
If you didn’t know better (or you were a Hamas groupie) you might call it an example of Israel’s menace. In fact it’s to help these warriors become intimately familiar with their weapons and to be ready in case the Arabs attack without warning. As they have before, and Hamas still does.
Instead of having to find an armory, they can go directly to their unit’s assembly point announced on Army radio. Like in 1973 when, on the last day of Yom Kippur, the Syrians threw more than a thousand Russian battle tanks into the Golan Heights. The IDF outposts held them, at great cost to themselves, as the reserves and conscripts raced to help.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 
