'Why Are American Jews So Anti-Gun?'

Updated: Thursday, May 15, 2008, 12:48 pm -- Another piece along the same lines. The New American magazine has a must-read interview with Aaron Zelman, founder of "Jews For The Preservation of Firearms Ownership." Take a look.

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Why are American Jews so anti-gun? So asks writer Eric King of Berkeley, Calif., who penned the story in March for the Jewish Daily Forward:

"I’ve been stumped by this communal aversion to firearms ever since I was a 6 year old, back in 1947. While flipping through old Life magazines one day in my grandparents’ living room in the Bronx, I came across photographs taken at the liberation of concentration camps. I saw the pictures of bodies stacked like cordwood, and was stunned.

“Mommy, why are all those people dead?” I asked. My mother, a brilliant and subtle woman, thought for a moment and said, “The bad Germans called Nazis killed them.” To which, of course, I asked, “Why did the Nazis kill them?” “They killed them because they were Jews,” she replied.

"Although I was only 6 and not yet sure of my identity or its meaning, I asked, “We’re Jews, aren’t we?” “Yes,” answered my mother. “Mommy,” I asked, without missing a beat, “do you and Daddy have a gun so we can protect ourselves if the Nazis come for us?”

“This is America,” my mother reassured me. “That can’t happen here.”

A moving and thoughtful story. Read it, and pass it on.

h/t to Clayton Cramer