Second Amendment

Purim: The Deeply Anti-Progressive Jewish Holiday

March 1, 2018 by Robert J. Avrech Leave a Comment

“The Banquet of Esther and Ahasuerus” by Jan Victors, 1640s.

Today is the holiday of Purim.

It is no accident that in 2015, Benjamin Netanyahu referenced Purim when delivering his powerful address to the U.S. Senate in an unsuccessful bid to curb Obama’s legitimization of a nuclear Iran.

Purim is an old ( 5th century B.C.E.) but painfully familiar story: A Jew-hater named Haman hatches a plan to annihilate the Jewish people in the ancient kingdom of Persia.

In a speech that Jews recognize all too well, Haman tells the king, “There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your realm. Their laws are different from those of every other people’s, and they do not observe the king’s laws; therefore it is not befitting the king to tolerate them.” (Esther 3:8.)

The king places the fate of the Jews into the hands of Grand Vizier Haman.

Jews and Guns

February 27, 2018 by Robert J. Avrech 1 Comment

A Jewish Ethiopian woman in the Israeli Defense Forces practices her marksmanship. In Israel, men and women are obligated to serve in the army.

I am republishing this entry, with some edits, because after the Parkland atrocity—a massive failure of local and federal government and law enforcement at every level—the antigun hysteria of the left, with their photogenic high school commissars in the vanguard, presents a danger to the Second Amendment.

Make no mistake about it; the left plans to do away with the Second Amendment through the anthropomorphism of weapons, a dangerous anti-intellectual intellectual trend.

If you think about it, all our rights are useless if the right to bear arms is nullified.

A final note: I was visiting a close friend who is a Holocaust survivor. We were talking about guns and the current antigun delirium which grips the left.

My friend said: “It was men with guns who liberated the camps.”

[Read more…] about Jews and Guns

Mass Shootings: What America Can Learn From Israel

February 20, 2018 by Robert J. Avrech 11 Comments

My wife Karen is extremely accurate with a Ruger Vaquero.

The after-shooting ritual is in full bloom. One side screams at the other—and no one hears anything.

Before getting to the article about Israel and the value of the armed citizen, I want to point out that asking the government to solve the problem of mass shootings is both impractical and dangerously utopian.

The problem is not weapons.

The problem is human evil.

And human evil cannot be legislated away.

The best that we can do is to defend against it.

Here are my suggestions:

How to Respond to the Sutherland Springs Massacre

November 6, 2017 by Robert J. Avrech 7 Comments

So far, the dead in the First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs massacre number 26, with 20 wounded.

This atrocity will, no doubt, devolve into a debate about gun control. Democrats will label the NRA evil, and the Republicans who support the Second Amendment as a bunch of knuckle draggers. Never mind that it seems it was good man with a gun who put a halt to the killing spree.

Gun debate aside, let me propose a few simple measures that the media should adopt in the wake of a mass killing.

Jews With and Without Guns

October 25, 2017 by Robert J. Avrech Leave a Comment

When Karen and I were in Israel we were comforted by the presence everywhere of Jews with guns. Karen’s brother David, an accomplished lawyer, Rabbi and businessman, carries his Glock nearly everywhere.

David is a good man. Thus, he is a good man with a gun.

The reason he carries a gun—and is licensed to do so in the Jewish state—is because there are millions of bad men and women, IslamoNazis, who seek to kill every Jew in Israel, every Jew on the face of the earth.

The only defense against a bad man with a weapon—any weapon—is a good man with a weapon.