Jewish Leaders Slam NRA Plan for More Guns

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 LaPierre’s statements. “It was outrageous, I must say, even for them,” said Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Assembly. Schonfeld said the NRA’s statement contained a “total absence of any sense of the common good or moral responsibility.”

“Judaism is very clear in that you don’t provide weapons to people who are likely to harm you,” Schonfeld added.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued a statement that said, “The NRA’s 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 NRA’s 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, there’s far too much violence in our entertainment, and it corrodes our children’s 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 don’t got take their mother’s 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.

LaPierre’s 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 I’ve 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 I’d been more vocal. You wonder, had we all been, could we have averted this?”

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.

“There’s 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.

http://jpfo.org/articles-assd02/why-jews-hate-guns.htm

JPFO WHITE PAPER
Why Jews Hate Guns
Are they right?
And who are The Shomrim?

by Rabbi Dovid Bendory, Rabbinic Director
Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership
and Author Alan Korwin, GunLaws.com

This white paper is also available as a PDF file
(Three column PDF version also available - ideal for printing.)

It’s no secret that one of the largest blocs of people pressing for so-called “gun control” is the culturally (aka not-so-religious) American Jewish community. This confounds many observers who would expect that Jews, with such a stunning history of oppression and murder by humanity’s villains, would cling tenaciously to personal firearms and the ability to protect themselves as the Hebrew Scriptures instruct.

In reaction to the Holocaust, American Jews adopted the phrase “Never Again!” If actions mean anything, they don’t believe it. That’s for someone else to do. How do Jews expect to put teeth behind the words “Never Again!” if not with the ability to apply and project personal force when righteous — and necessary — for survival?

Why then do so many American Jews hate guns and fear gun ownership so much?

Our research identifies ten reasons why these Jews feel the way they do about self defense in general, firearms specifically and your own right to keep and bear arms.

The adamantly anti-gun-rights Jews are bowing to:
1. A desire for utopian moral purity
2. A disproportional incidence of hoplophobia
3. A quest for power through victimization of peers
4. A utopian delusion that if guns would just “go away,”
crime would end and the world would be a peaceful safe place
5. Self hatred and a wish to be helpless, acting out guilt-based
behavioral problems that develop in childhood
6. The Ostrich Syndrome
7. Garden-variety hypocrisy
8. Adulterated religion — Jews In Name Only (JINOs)
9. Feel-good sophistry
10. Abject fear that yields irrational behavior

Despite the modern American Jewish aversion to arms, it has not always been so, and Israeli Jews certainly understand the value of arms. Throughout history, there were Jews who fought in defense of their people and way of life. The Torah is filled with Jews who took up arms in righteous and valiant defensive action. See, for example, The Ten Commandments of Self Defense, (Bendory and JPFO, 2009); or recall, “When Abraham heard that his nephew Lot was taken captive, he took the 318 trained soldiers of his house and pursued the captors,” defeated them, brought back Lot, and exacted retribution with their looted property. (Genesis 14:14)

Contemporary Jews may have largely acquiesced to their WWII inquisitors, but Biblical Jews resisted their Egyptian slave masters and then fought countless fierce battles against invaders and anti-Semites, such as Amelek, the Philistines and Haman.

Jews have been assaulted, accosted, and oppressed by nearly every nation and empire in history, including the ancient Greeks, Romans, Persians, Byzantines, Ottomans and of course modern nations like Germany and the USSR.

Miraculously, Jews have outlasted all those who would annihilate them, typically by using force of arms. Perhaps their liberal modern approach to assault and suffering — “Don’t fight back, it will only make matters worse” — holds lessons for us. Or perhaps not: it is very hard to witness open-pit graves piled high with emaciated corpses without emotional revulsion. How much worse could matters get?

“Culturally proper” Jews will not want to openly face the tortured reasoning of their Faustian bargain behind “don’t make it worse.” That doesn’t make the following reasons any less real or mortally dangerous. And Jews are not alone in relying on these justifications for rejecting the fundamental human right of self defense. Many other gunless people will also recognize their feelings accurately described by what we have found.

We would not dream of interfering with a free person’s freedom to choose and embrace defenselessness or to go gunless. On the other hand, there can be no tolerance for anyone who attempts to force others to behave so dangerously.
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This is from a Rabbi too. Much more to read at link if you are at all interested.

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