The February 2011 Chronicle included an obituary for gun-ownership rights advocate Aaron Zelman. While I respected his opinion, I disagree with it very much.
As a child of the Shoah and a son of two Jewish partisans, Irving and Faye Porter, I need to clarify some misconceptions about guns and the Holocaust.The giving of guns to victims of genocide is controversial among scholars and human rights activists such as myself. In places like Darfur, Rwanda, Burundi, Bosnia, Kosova, and right now, in Libya, I support the necessity to supply tribes with rifles and other means of defense.
Such guns, most experts agree, could make genocide difficult, maybe even stop it. Of course, the victim could turn and commit genocide upon the victimizer. That, too, has happened.
But for the Shoah, even if you gave every Jew a gun, we still would have lost. It was like an uprising on death row, doomed to failure from the start.
We were up against one of the mightiest armies the world had ever seen and only another army like that of the U.S. and the Soviet Union could have stopped it; and even those armies lost millions of men and women.
To equate “gun control” with capitulation to Nazi Germany is absurd. To say that to support gun restrictions “leads to anti-Semitism” is equally absurd. Finally, it is not in our interest as Jews to favor gun ownership.
A recent study by professors of law at the University of Chicago and Duke University, Jens Ludwig, Philip J. Cook and Justin McCrary, in their book “Controlling Crime: Strategies and Tradeoffs,” says that where more households have guns, the overall homicide rate goes up. This is not good for Jews.
My dad never had a gun, and my mom would never allow a gun in the house, despite my father having killed 13 Nazis and Ukrainian collaborators during the war. In America, he felt, he did not need a gun.
Jack Nusan Porter
Newtonville, Mass.
Former Milwaukeean Jack Nusan Porter, Ph.D., is the author of “The Genocidal Mind” and is a former treasurer of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
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