Hanging with a couple of friends this evening, watching the local news. The results of the gun bill passage is announced, they go "boo," so I go "yay." This doesn't go over well.
I can sort of understand how someone who is liberal could be for gun control. [ie, big government must save us from the evil corporations pushing a gun culture, by controling who can purchase guns]. But I really can't understand how someone who is Jewish, with a fairly large amount of institutional memory of the Holocaust, could be for gun control. Does the Holocaust simply have a different meaning? I don't get it.
Posted by Owlish at October 21, 2005 12:29 AM | TrackBackI think that the Jews who came to the US before the Holocaust don't have that "institutional memory". Before the Holocaust the jews, as a whole, had decided to be passive to the persecution and pogroms, for fear of making it worse. The remaining European Jews, after 1945, realized that passivity in the face of hatred and persecution would not protect them. Thus the decision, more or less as a group, to fight back. But the American Jewish community doesn't have that background, so they tend to be much more part of the anti-war, anti-gun left.
Posted by: Eric at October 21, 2005 08:29 AMOk, I guess that makes some sense. I don't really get it, but I don't think I ever will.
Posted by: owlish at October 21, 2005 12:07 PMI don't get it either.
Posted by: Eric at October 21, 2005 01:13 PM