Seraphic Secret

Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Jew Without A Gun

Passover 2016: The Slave Learns to Love His Shackles

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Daenerys Targaryn, Emilia Clarke in Game of Thrones. “The slave learns to love his shackles.”
Daenerys Targaryn, Emilia Clarke, Game of Thrones. “The slave learns to love his shackles.”

Friday night begins the holiday of Passover in which Jews celebrate deliverance from Egyptian bondage.

In order to escape the shackles of slavery, the vast machinery of the mighty Egyptian state had to be crushed. Those who wielded absolute power were reduced to nothingness. G-d did this not only to diminish the physical power of a pitiless slave state, but to begin the process of making free the minds of the Israelites.

Slavery is an insidious institution, not only because it shackles the body, but creates a mentality where the slave identifies with his master to such a degree that he becomes complicit in his own bondage. He loves his master and cannot imagine a world absent an overlord.

As Daenerys Targaryn (Emilia Clarke) observes (via screenwriters) in Game of Thrones, “The slave learns to love his shackles.”

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Jew With Gun

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My new Smith & Wesson MP Shield 9 mm. Small enough to fit in my Tallis bag.
My new Smith & Wesson MP Shield 9 mm is small enough to fit in my Tallis (prayer shawl) bag, but big enough for self-defense. The lettering at the top is my name in Hebrew.

There is no such thing as gun violence.

The left uses the absurd phrase “gun violence” in order to rid our culture of human agency — in other words, of morality. The left denies the notion of good and evil just as it denies IslamoNazi terror, a malignant ideology that is spreading like cancer across the globe.

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Jew Without A Gun

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Because of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, I am republishing my three-part series about the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 in which Karen and I and the children were trapped for several frightening hours. We were unarmed, helpless save for our wits. The police were conspicuously absent and the bad guys, frequently armed with heavy weapons, owned the streets.

It was a defining moment in my life.

I’m reposting this series as a cautionary tale because civil riots sharpen the claws of statist utopians whose ultimate aim is to disarm law-abiding American citizens.

Just as Obamacare has nothing to do with health, and cap and trade has nothing to do with so-called global warming, anti-gun laws have nothing to do with saving children’s lives.

It’s just another opportunity for the left to centralize power.

Los Angeles burns, 1992.

Part One

Hollywood is Burning

Hollywood is on fire.

Karen and I lock every door in the house, shut tight the windows. We move through the house switching off all the lights.

Gazing from our bedroom window we watch orange flames lick at the darkness, pillars of black smoke climb into the sky. We can actually smell the acrid odor of burning rubber.

“Look how close they are,” says Karen.

“Just past La Cienega. Maybe eight blocks away.”

Karen gives me a long penetrating gaze:

“What do we do if they come here?”

My mind is racing away. The truth is we are defenseless. Unless I get crazy inventive like Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs.

“After this is all over,” I vow, “I’m going to buy a pistol.”

Karen says: “How about a shotgun?”

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Harvard Study: No Correlation Between Gun Control And Less Violent Crime

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Someone once asked me what are the most important ingredients for a hit movie. I replied: “A girl with a gun.”
Recently, an aspiring screenwriter asked me to name the most important ingredients for a movie. Without hesitation, I replied: “A girl with a gun.” Here is the great Gloria Grahame in A Woman’s Secret, 1949.

Good grief.

You know the world is shifting off its axis when a Harvard study comes to the conclusion that more guns means less crime.

As a reminder of how this plays out in the real world, here’s Jew Without a Gun, Seraphic Secret’s most widely read post about the 1992 L.A. riots, in which Karen and I and the children were trapped for several frightening hours. We were unarmed, helpless save for our wits. The police were conspicuously absent, and the bad guys, frequently armed with heavy weapons, owned the streets. It was a defining moment in my life.

Anyhoo.

Ordinarily, Seraphic Secret is not a fan of academic studies. Most of them are nonsensical. But when a study comes to a common sense conclusion, we do sit up and take notice.

This is because we are big fans of common sense — which is in rather short supply these days.

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