Jews and Guns

Jews and Guns

The March 20, 2008 Jewish Daily Forward has a very thoughtful article by Eric King that asks the question, "Why Are American Jews So Anti-Gun?"

I’ve been stumped by this communal aversion to firearms ever since I was a 6 year old, back in 1947. While flipping through old Life magazines one day in my grandparents’ living room in the Bronx, I came across photographs taken at the liberation of concentration camps. I saw the pictures of bodies stacked like cordwood, and was stunned.
“Mommy, why are all those people dead?” I asked.
My mother, a brilliant and subtle woman, thought for a moment and said, “The bad Germans called Nazis killed them.” To which, of course, I asked, “Why did the Nazis kill them?”
“They killed them because they were Jews,” she replied.
Although I was only 6 and not yet sure of my identity or its meaning, I asked, “We’re Jews, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” answered my mother.
“Mommy,” I asked, without missing a beat, “do you and Daddy have a gun so we can protect ourselves if the Nazis come for us?”
“This is America,” my mother reassured me. “That can’t happen here.”
All across America little Jewish boys and girls got the same answer, and pretty much all of them accepted it. That answer, though, didn’t satisfy me — and to this day I wonder how it is that Jews in America, despite no small amount of antisemitism, have so strongly devoted themselves to the belief that “it” couldn’t happen here.

Some years back, I had two co-workers. One of them was the child of an Englishman and an Austrian woman. His mother's family were aristocrats who fled the Nazis after the Anschluss--losing the family castle in the process. He was a gun owner, and knew full well where a disarmed society can lead.

The other co-worker was Jewish, and insisted that there was no need for an armed population: something like the Holocaust could never happen in America. "Americans are different," he insisted. While a comforting belief, I really don't find it plausible that Americans are so fundamentally different from Germans, Rwandans, Cambodians, Turks, and all the other nations that have, at one time or another, decided to slaughter their neighbors.

King's argument for why anti-gun sentiment is so strong among American Jews is an idea that I have seen before:

A great many American Jews had great-grandparents who originally came from shtetls or ghettos in Europe. One of the major hazards of living in another people’s country was that occasionally a few Cossacks would get drunk, ride over to the nearest shtetl, rape a few women, maybe murder a man who protested rather than begging for his life, and then ride off into the sunset.
It had to be inescapably clear to these Jews that dozens of able-bodied and sober men would surely have been a match for eight or 10 drunk Cossacks. It would have been easy, even for Jews not trained in arms, to kill the Cossacks and bury them someplace.
It is obvious, though, why they did not: Had they had done so, swarms of Cossacks would have massacred every Jew in every shtetl within 100 versts. Defense was just not an option.
The women raped and the men murdered were seen as the price Jews paid for surviving as a people. Since no Jew likely considered the possibility that without some major provocation the Cossacks would someday try to kill them all, it seemed like a reasonable, if awful, compromise.
Such a compromise must have taken a devastating and horrific psychological toll on the people forced to make it. In order to maintain self-respect, people in such a condition had to explain it as the result of something that made them better than their oppressors. This was the notion that they voluntarily — rather than of necessity, as was actually the case — eschewed the use of weapons because they understood that violence was evil, while their tormentors did not. It was the key to survival, and to self-respect.

I think this is correct; it conforms to what I have read elsewhere. It is also similar to the reasons why various quietist sects of Christianity came through the trauma of the Thirty Years Wars with a strong commitment to pacifism--and then migrated to America, where they only had to deal with Indians, not with professional armies raping their women, and torturing their men. It is difficult to tell most people, "Don't fight back--this only makes it worse." If you can put a pragmatic need on a higher moral standing, it is easier for some people to accept.

Some of the comments on King's article take issue with his explanation, and argue that the anti-gun sentiment of American Jews is based on liberalism:

I intend no offense, but I must say, unequivocally, that Mr. King has missed the point entirely. Jewish antipathy toward firearms has nothing to do with the shtetl, and everything to do with liberalism.
The essence of liberal philosophy is that the liberal feels that he is smarter, more sophisticated, more knowledgeable, better informed, and generally wiser than the great majority of his fellow citizens. From this he infers the right to tell others what to do. He considers himself to be like a parent, with us as the children, who are loved, but since immature must be controlled. And just as one would not give a firearm to a 7-year-old, the liberal wants guns taken away from us untrustworthy commoners.