Guest commentary
Exclusive to The Zelman Partisans
By “New Class Traitor”

I am a Jew and substantially grew up in Europe. I have never owned a firearm, and my skills handling one are rudimentary at best. This probably makes me the least probable 2nd Amendment supporter.

Like most Europeans across the political spectrum, I used to take gun control for granted, and shared snooty Euro prejudices about the crazy obsession of Americans with firearm ownership.

I continued to do so even for some time after getting mugged by the reality of 9/11 and the Second Intifada, and gradually morphing from Euro-style social democrat to constitutional conservative. In part this was due to cultural conditioning — just as I always took mandatory national ID cards for granted (another debate entirely). But one must not discount European fear of “the mob” (both organized and unorganized), something deeply rooted in the collective memory, especially of Jews.

In the Bay Area for graduate school, I still did not question my assumptions. I was still a leftist after all, although my contact with some of the more pathological exponents of the postmodern, cultural-Marxist, and neo-racist left in academia sowed the seeds of doubt that later would blossom.

Then work got me to Israel for the first time. The first time one of my subordinates showed up with nothing less than a Galil assault rifle — she was an IDF soldier on reserve duty — I could not help staring. She looked at me like “Oy vey, this shrinking violet from abroad is afraid of the gun.” To put her at ease, I asked a few basic gun safety questions, she got the message I sought to convey, and we reached an understanding. I knew she had been trained in its use, and that rough men and women like her stood between us and the war’s desolation. “There are no dangerous weapons, only dangerous people.”

Then I moved to Chicagoland. There I saw first-hand the absurd dichotomy: official gun control on the one hand, yet areas of town where gang violence resulted in an environment statistically as dangerous as a war zone. Clearly the laws were quite ineffective in curbing possession of all sorts of firearms by the gangs.

But I need not have been surprised. A classmate back in Europe whose parents ran a gun store (they took early retirement) told me that a law-abiding citizen, in order to legally carry a handgun, needed no less than four separate permits (purchase, ownership, transport, and carry). Yet at the same time, anybody who had connections with the underworld could go to certain spots in Brussels and buy pretty much any firearm, cash on the barrel. This was the situation at least as far back as the 1960s: this was well enough known to erstwhile Reuters reporter Frederick Forsyth that he made it a plot device in his genre-defining thriller The Day of the Jackal, and it is the situation now when French ISIS operatives come to Brussels to buy hardware.

After another stint abroad, we moved to the Dallas area. In our solidly middle-class subdivision, we were probably the only people not to have several “boomsticks” in the house. Several of our neighbors had signs suggestive of a revolver with the words “We don’t call 911.” Yet we never felt unsafe for a moment there. Those “ominous” signs did not stop me from walking my dog in the neighborhood or walking up to people’s doors. In fact, when alone in the house, I often did not bother to lock my door. Despite guns? Or because of them?

This was also the time when I saw the descent of many British working- and middle-class neighborhoods into living hell — despite draconian gun restrictions, and thanks to knives, not guns. This has been chronicled to a fare-thee-well by “Theodore Dalrymple,” the pseudonym of a British GP who worked in these areas until he moved to rural France in his retirement.

Most recently, after our move back to Israel, we were confronted with knife attacks by Arab terrorists that the population has only limited means of stopping because — guess what? — Israel has pretty restrictive gun ownership outside the “disputed territories.” This has led to some theater of the absurd which I have blogged about elsewhere. The idea of noncombat soldiers in the Israel Defense (!) Forces being made to travel without service weapons makes any red-blooded Zionist see red. Fortunately, Israel’s government is now making at least baby steps toward relaxing restrictions on gun ownership.

Over the years I learned many important lessons.

For one, already mentioned: there are no dangerous firearms, only dangerous people.

For another: organized crime and/or terrorists will always find ways to acquire weapons. Gun control laws effectively disarm the law-abiding, while laws have little to no influence on scofflaws. And while gun control may keep firearms out of the hands of petty thug gangs, they will simply switch weapons to knives.

For a third: The often-cited problem of people with severe mental health issues obtaining firearms and going on shooting rampages with them is most efficiently treated by tackling “the nut, not the gun.”

For a fourth: the 2nd Amendment was originally instituted as a safeguard against a tyrannical central government. I used to consider this a chimeric scenario. It took 2008 and the beginning of an unprecedented era of central overreach, to make me realize this is not a chimera. (This aspect of the 2nd Amendment is probably the least known and understood by Europeans — those who immigrate from 3rd-world countries will readily understand once this is pointed out to them.)

In this day and age, no city on Earth is a true “safe space” anymore, while if one chooses to live in the countryside, it is nonhuman predators one needs to be prepared for, thanks in no small measure to the unintended consequences of endangered species preservation measures.

I no longer fear gun ownership. I fear the lack thereof.

—–

Ed. note: This commentary appeared first on TZP’s weekly email alert. If you would like to be among the first to see new commentary (as well as to get notice of new polls and recaps of recent posts), please sign up for our alert list. (See sidebar or, if you’re on a mobile device, scroll down). Be sure to respond when you receive your activation email!