Self-defense for European
Jews - and everyone else
A police officer talks to a man outside the Paris kosher grocery
where Amedy Coulibaly killed four people in a terror attack in January
By Adam B. Summers. Feb 11, 2015
Article Source
Despite being dated from 2015, this article eight years on is no less relevant in the present day. The right to self defense remains a basic human right but despite that there are those (many) who would seek to deprive people of the necessary tools to implement such and be better able to survive violence.
There is a growing sense of unease these days among Jews in Europe. In the wake of rising anti-Semitism on the Continent, including shootings by apparent Islamic extremists at a kosher market in Paris last month that killed four and at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in Brussels in May that also left four dead, an influential rabbi has proposed relaxing gun-control laws in Europe to allow more Jews to defend themselves.
“We hereby ask that gun licensing laws are reviewed with immediate effect to allow designated people in the Jewish communities and institutions to own weapons for the essential protection of their communities, as well as receiving the necessary training to protect their members from potential terror attacks,” wrote Rabbi Menachem Margolin, general director of the European Jewish Association, in an open letter to the European Union.
The sense of danger has gotten so great that it has prompted some Jews to leave Europe altogether. A recent story in the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph spotlighted the plight of Simon and Honey Gould and their two teenage children, who are moving from Manchester, England, to Scottsdale, Ariz., in search of a more peaceful life.
“I know there are plenty of people who simply want to live a peaceful co-existence,” said Mrs. Gould. “But there is so much anti-Semitism in Britain, and it’s coming from all sides. Our local Jewish schools look like prison camps. They’re surrounded by wire fences. There are guards on patrol, some with dogs. … I don’t want to sit at home panicking when my husband goes to the synagogue. I just want to live in peace.”
Europeans, and Jews in particular, should be very sensitive both to anti-Semitism and to the helplessness that comes when only criminals and extremists have weapons. In his 2014 book, “Gun Control in the Third Reich,” constitutional lawyer and gun-rights scholar Stephen Halbrook details how the Nazis disarmed Jews and other “enemies of the state” to facilitate their butchery and purges of “undesirables.”
Prior to the ascension of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to power, Germany’s Weimar Republic government had passed a law in 1928 requiring extensive police records on gun owners. In 1931, it authorized the registration of all firearms, which could also be confiscated if deemed necessary for “public safety.”
“In 1933, the ultimate extremist group, led by Adolf Hitler, seized power and used the records to identify, disarm and attack political opponents and Jews,” Halbrook wrote in a column for National Review. “Constitutional rights were suspended, and mass searches for, and seizures of, guns and dissident publications ensued. Police revoked gun licenses of Social Democrats and others who were not ‘politically reliable.’”
A similar pattern followed in Nazi-occupied France, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Romania, Yugoslavia and Greece. In November 1938, the Nazis used the search for weapons as a pretext for Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, in which Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were ransacked and burned.
Europeans and Americans alike should, thus, reject gun registration databases. In addition to being a totally ineffective way of deterring gun violence, since criminals and extremists can easily obtain weapons by illegal means, gun registries are dangerous to law-abiding gun owners when the wrong people come into power, as has been demonstrated repeatedly throughout history.
The right to defend one’s life is, as America’s founders observed, “unalienable,” and is not restricted to U.S. borders. The notion of allowing European Jews to more readily obtain guns to defend themselves is, therefore, a noble one, but why restrict this freedom to one threatened group? The right belongs to all, and all should be free to exercise it. As European Jews know all too well, it is the last defense against extremist attackers and tyrannical governments.
Adam B. Summers
Adam B. Summers is a research fellow at the Independent Institute and a former editorial writer and columnist for the Orange County Register and the Southern California News Group.
