A while back there was a book called “Your Inner Child of the Past”. It’s been a long time, but the basic idea was that who we are as adults is largely influenced by our upbringing and childhood experiences.
I was born into a Reform Jewish family in 1949. As such, Israel had just become a nation, and I recall a lot of pride in my family about that. At the same time, it was hard for me not to gradually become aware of the Holocaust as I grew up. When I was ready, movies like Exodus and Judgment at Nuremberg could not help but make an impression on me.
Of course I felt the overall horror of those events. But what sticks in my mind was the images of fathers meekly lining up with their families along ditches outside of town to be machine-gunned and dumped into a pit already filling with bodies. Why did they not resist? It seemed downright shameful to let your family be murdered with absolutely no attempt to resist.
Later I found out that some brave souls did resist. In “The Wall” John Hersey tells of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the select few that chose to fight, and how valuable a gun was in that fight. “The Avengers - A Jewish War Story” Rich Cohen tells the story of what Jews with guns can do once they decide to fight. It’s naive to think a single Jew with a gun, or even a small group of such Jews, can win against a squad of SS. But they can die as men and women, and not like sheep to the slaughter, and perhaps in some small way help shape the outcome of a war.
The story often played out in this rough fashion:
A group of friends decides to resist. One has a Liberator pistol dropped by the Allies. He locates an isolated German soldier and shoots him, getting his sidearm in the process. This gets repeated several times, with some loss of life, but a small arsenal of handguns is slowly acquired. With those guns they plan an ambush of a German squad and, despite casualties defeats them and secures their weapons, including machine pistols. With those weapons they may even to be able to raid an arsenal. And so on. In any case this happened in one form or another in Warsaw, in the Polish and French countrysides - wherever determined Jews decided NOT to go gently into that good night.
In any case, that history helped shape who I am today. I do not fear death, per se´, but do fear being executed before my time, whether it be by a simple robber, a crazed gunman, a terrorist, or, admittedly remotely, a foreign or domestic military or government gone bad.
As such, the right and ability to bear arms is for me very, very important.
For those raised differently, or with other life experiences, I respect your decision not to bear arms. In the vast majority of cases, the powers-that-be will protect you from harm. I just feel that, in the final analysis, its important to be the master of one’s own fate, and that a firearm can be an important tool in the shaping of that fate.
“When they kick at your front door
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head
Or on the trigger of your gun?”
The Clash - Guns of Brixton
