Trying to persuade liberal Jews that guns can save their children’s lives

Gun control debate settled in 1791I tell myself that it’s a sign of my native smarts that I had the intellectual flexibility to abandon the Leftist ideologies that controlled the first 2/3 of my life to date and to embrace entirely new ideas. In other words, I’m not a weak-minded weather vane; I’m a THINKER.

The reason I mention this is that nowhere has my thinking changed more profoundly than when it comes to guns. After all, despite my Democrat party affiliation I was always patriotic, always supported the Constitution, always supported Israel, thought badly of Communism etc.

The one area in which I’ve made a complete 180 is guns. Before my becoming a born again Second Amendment supporter, I never thought about (1) the values the Founders were advancing, (2) the nature of individual liberty, or (3) the fact that the biggest killer of individuals, always — in any time, at any place, under any circumstances — is government.  Instead, I simplistically, naively argued that guns are bad because they kill people. To my regret, I put my money where my mouth is, donating to the Brady organization and other anti-gun groups.

Perhaps it’s a sign of true repentance that I’ve tried to make what reparation I can for my foolish, unthinking views. I belong to the NRA; I am trying to bring up children who understand that guns are neither killing machines nor toys but are, instead, important tools in the never-ending fight against tyranny; and I try to get people to rethink guns.

One of those opportunities to change other people’s thinking came about just the other day. One of my Facebook friends is a very liberal Jewish woman who is also very supportive of Israel. She’s really struggling with the fact that America’s colleges and universities are hot-beds of good, old-fashioned, “burn the Jews and bomb Israel” antisemitism. She therefore put up a post about the spread of antisemitism, along with a comment about how dreadful this is. This bit of by-play then ensued in the comments:

One of her Progressive friends: What’s even worse [than all that Jew-hatred] is that the NRA wants college campuses to allow open carry. What’s happening in this country?

Me, in “real me” mode: I’d rather my Jewish kids were armed against people preaching this violent antisemitism than unarmed. History shows that, while armed Jews don’t end up in gas chambers, unarmed ones do.

I even added a photograph:

Jews getting rounded up

And then something interesting happened: After I wrote my comment, none of the usual Progressive suspects leaped into the fray to denounce me for defending gun rights. I fully expected to do battle, because that’s been the norm on Facebook when I let some of my libertarian/conservative values ooze out.

What happened instead was total silence. I like to think that this silence came about because a whole bunch of Jewish parents had this brief epiphany about the way in which guns not only kill people, but also defend them — and sometimes the people who are defended are your own children.

While I’m talking about guns and gun rights, here are three links you may find interesting:

Guns aren’t crazy, uncontrolled things that suddenly go off spontaneously, like a string of lit firecrackers. They simply sit there, waiting for responsible people to handle them responsibly or for irresponsible people to handle them stupidly — kind of like cars. Sean Davis has 14 points to illustrate this principle.

If you scan this list of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world, aside from noticing that many are in Latin America and that our president has issued an open-door invitation to the residents of those cities (both do-gooders and criminals) to enter our country, you’ll also notice that all of these cities are in areas of extreme to more extreme gun control.

And lastly, speaking of tyrannical governments and gun control, what was once a Chris Rock joke about banning bullets is now becoming real Obama policy (and is already on the books in California in slightly different form). I would argue that rendering guns useless by doing away with bullets is precisely as unconstitutional as banning guns in the first place.