If wishes were fishes...

 I have two articles to highlight today, both from the American Thinker and both related to self-defense and guns.

The first I noticed last night, but it was too late, and I was too tired to write about it. Andrea Widburg had a post entitled Lox and load, a Jewish gun club, slowly grows across America. My first thought was: It's about time, after I had a chuckle over the pun. I have always wondered where the notion came from that Jews were supposed to be sitting ducks waiting to be slaughtered. It is nowhere in the Law, the five books of Moses. The 10 Commandments contain a law that says one may not murder, but by extension it also means that one must defend oneself and those in one's care. And indeed, the ancient Israelites were a warrior people.

I believe that history proves that all Jews should be legally armed and defensively dangerous. As law-abiding citizens and moral human beings, we should always be able to exercise our God-given right to self-defense. Fortunately, it seems that, slowly but steadily, more and more American Jews—a demographic that was traditionally anti-gun—are beginning to see things my way.

I grew up in a very anti-gun home, something that mostly came from my mother. My parents had experienced World War II and the Israeli War of Independence firsthand. My dad was a combatant in both wars, first in the RAF and then in the Israel Defense Forces (“IDF”). Dad’s lesson was that a good rifle will defend you, and he eventually bought an old British Lee-Enfield rifle...which Mom promptly made him get rid of.

Why did she do that? Different life lessons.

My mother was a victim of World War II (she was interned in a Japanese concentration camp in Java) and an IDF cartographer in the Israeli War of Independence. Although she knew how to handle a rifle as part of her IDF basic training, she was never a combatant.

Maybe that was why Mom was one of those Jews who learned the wrong lesson about guns: Namely, that the problem is the gun, not the ideology that drives the person holding the gun (whether that ideology is basic criminality or race- or religion-driven hatred). Our family’s Democrat politics reinforced this attitude.

This is fascinating. It is a matter of Christian faith that man is born sinful, and there is nothing he can do about it. That is why we need Christ, to forgive our sins. The belief is derived from the Bible, right there in Genesis, where Eve takes a bite of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and gives some to Adam. Right then and there, God set a plan in motion to ultimately save mankind. The Hebrew texts contain the exact same material, but for some reason Jews read these facts differently. People like her mother seem to believe that people are good, it is just the instruments that are evil.  In any case, I am glad to see these people waking up.

Next up we have Mike McDaniel telling us that Anti-liberty/cracktivists are...let's say deceptive. McDaniel cites one such person, a Professor John J. Davenport PhD at Fordham University. He fisks a statement by Davenport, who describes himself as a philosopher of "peace and justice."  Like Widburg's mother, he is sure that the bad guys are really good.  It is just the guns that somehow made them kill.  And if wishes were fishes...but they are not.

McDaniel concludes with this:

It appears the professor is a bit light on the “justice” part. The right to keep and bear guns is a fundamental, unalienable right. Smoking isn’t. If it’s in the Constitution banning it is off the table. And if we want to deter and stop attacks, we need to ensure many willing citizens are armed in colleges and everywhere else and potential attackers know it.

That’s what saves lives, not disarming people who would harm no one. You know, the peaceful and just?

Please read both pieces as they are short.