Posted on 12/21/2012 7:32:22 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
The powerful gun rights lobby went on the offensive on Friday arguing that schools should have armed guards, on a day that Americans remembered the victims of the Newtown, Connecticut school massacre with a moment of silence.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, said Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association, noting that banks and airports are patrolled by armed guards, while schools typically are not.
His remarks - in which he charged that the news media and violent video games shared blame for the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history - were twice interrupted by protesters who unfurled signs and shouted stop the killing.
Speaking in Washington, LaPierre urged lawmakers to station armed police officers in all schools by the time students return from the Christmas break in January. LaPierre did not take questions from reporters.
Response from the Jewish community was swift and critical of LaPierres statements. It was outrageous, I must say, even for them, said Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly. Schonfeld said the NRAs statement contained a total absence of any sense of the common good or moral responsibility.
Judaism is very clear in that you dont provide weapons to people who are likely to harm you, Schonfeld added.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued a statement that said, The NRAs Washington leadership has long been out of step with its members, and never has that been so apparent as this morning. Their press conference was a shameful evasion of the crisis facing our country. Instead of offering solutions to a problem they have helped create, they offered a paranoid, dystopian vision of a more dangerous and violent America where everyone is armed and no place is safe.
Congressman Jerrold Nadler called the NRAs response to the Newtown shootings as, both ludicrous and insulting, and called the NRA fundamentally out of step with the American people on the issue of gun violence.
Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center, also condemned the response and dismissed laying blame on violent video games as a root cause of increased violence. Yes, theres far too much violence in our entertainment, and it corrodes our childrens souls, and we have to change tha,t and religious communities can be helpful, Saperstein said. But in scores of other nations who see the same films, play the same video games, they dont got take their mothers legally acquired Bushmaster rifle and walk into schools and shoot people. The difference between those countries and ours is the availability of weapons.
The blog, New Voices, printed an editorial this morning that called gun violence a Jewish issue and a student issue.
Earlier on Friday, church bells rang out in tree-lined suburban Newtown and up and down the East Coast at 9:30 a.m. EST (1430 GMT) in memory of the victims of the attack on Dec. 14 in which 28 people, including the gunman, were killed.
LaPierres comments came at the end of a week when President Barack Obama commissioned a new White House task force to find a way to quell violence, a challenge in a nation with a strong culture of individual gun ownership.
We have to have a comprehensive way in which to respond to the mass murder of our children that we saw in Connecticut, Vice President Joe Biden, who heads the task force, said on Thursday.
The U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to bear arms and hundreds of millions of weapons are in private hands.
About 11,100 Americans died in gun-related killings in 2011, not including suicides, according to preliminary data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some U.S. lawmakers called for swift passage of an assault weapons ban. Some Newtown residents have already launched an effort aimed at tightening rules on gun ownership.
What I feel is a sense of guilt because Ive been a strong advocate of gun control for years, said John Dewees, 61, who was in downtown Newtown, where a makeshift memorial rose several feet around two Christmas trees with teddy bears and flower bouquets. I wish Id been more vocal. You wonder, had we all been, could we have averted this?
SHATTERED ILLUSION OF SAFETY
The attack, which killed 20 first graders ages 6 and 7, shattered the illusion of safety in this close-knit town of 27,000 people where many residents knew someone affected by the attacks.
Theres just so many connections, said Jay Petrusaitis, whose son was in the same high school class as the gunman.
Churches as far south as Florida and at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., rang their bells.
Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy had called for residents of his state to observe the moment of silence to mark a week since a 20-year-old gunman killed his mother and then stormed Sandy Hook Elementary School. He killed a total of 28 people that day, including six school teachers and staff in a rampage that ended when he turned his gun on himself.
Governors in Maine, Illinois, Michigan and several other states also called for moments of silence.
The gunman, Adam Lanza, used a military-style assault rifle and police said he carried hundreds of bullets in high-capacity magazines, as well as two handguns.
The weapons were legally purchased and registered to his mother, Nancy, his first victim.
They prefer being gassed to being shot?
They won’t do that, he’s a good Kapo.
The Jewish Daily FORWARD has been a
communist rag for over a hundred years.
These people are literally insane. I know some of us often quip that liberalism is a mental illness, but that is no longer a quip.
It is REALITY.
If you would have had them when Hitler was around...
All the demented deviates, nutcases, sicko's, and the twisted violent lumberheads agree with the Rabbi.
The older I get the less I know.
At least physics isn’t changing so I can keep my job.
What a load of Hooey.
Da Juice would not even have an effective biomass as a human sub species if it were not for Zionists who bear arms
in defence of their people, they would have bene wiped out by Nazis and Muslims.
Give it time....
She also said that “Jews don’t believe in giving weapons to those who would harm us” (sic). I guess she means any police officers or teachers would guard a school. What a dope.
>> Jewish leaders?
>> Is that like Black leaders?
Let’s revisit Hitler’s use of the Jews willing to betray their blood.
That’s a nasty comment.
.
That’s not a nasty comment but actually a very good question for the Leftist Yids.
The problem is that the American Jews have no sense of reality about Israel for they don’t stand with Israel which is odd as they sided with our PoS 0b0z0. It seems that they would rather see a reoccurrance of the past than face what is truly happening today. This administration is evil and if he finds a way to disarm the American people, he will be just like Stalin towards Christians, Jews, veterans and former police officers who still believe in the oath they made to defend the U.S.Constitution foreign and domestic.
any american liberal jew is liberal first and jewish a distant second. all of them are KAPOs and completely ignorant of history and ashamed of israel.
Stupid U.S. Jewish Leaders?
Here is Israel’s solution to school shootings:
http://www.israeltoday.co.il/Portals/0/121217_armedteachers.jpg
Article:
http://www.israeltoday.co.il/NewsItem/tabid/178/nid/23572/Default.aspx
To #5: Not all Jews are fools or cowards. There are a lot of Jewish policemen, soldiers, and in other law enforcement positions, including my son who is a combat veteran of Iraq.
However, you only hear from the wacko leftists like Saperstein or liberal no-nothings like Bloomturd and Nadler and some of the Jewish organization leaders who forget that Jews have been specifically targetted for death by Islamic jihadists in the US (LAX, Seattle Jewish building, Kahane - by Al Qaeda operative); Orthodox Jews in NYC by black gangs; Synagogues firebombed or shot up; Jewish leaders targetted for assassination by all kinds of extremists from White to Black to Moslem, etc).
Some of us are armed and willing to use them to defend our family, friends, neighbors, schools, shuals, churches and the stranger.
Some of us learned the lessons of the Holocaust which explained why we don’t have European families anymore.
NEVER AGAIN!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.