Judy was Right
By Nicki Kenyon, Auguest 2nd 2014
JPFO writer contributor, © 2014.
Brian Judy
A few days ago, an NRA lobbyist by the name of Brian Judy got himself in a bit of hot water with the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle when he linked gun control to the Holocaust. An audio clip on some liberal blog, according to press featured Judy talking about Jews who support gun control. Judy supposedly made the remarks at a gathering in Seattle to the opposition to Initiative 594 – a measure that would expand background checks for gun purchases.
In the recording, a speaker references Nick Hanauer, a Seattle entrepreneur who has contributed more than $US300,000 to an independent-expenditure group supporting I-594. Hanauer, who is Jewish, wrote recently in Politico about how his family fled Nazi Germany. The speaker on the recording references Mr Hanauer's piece:
"Now (Hanauer is) funding, he's put half a million dollars, toward this policy, the same policy that led to his family getting run out of Germany by the Nazis. You know, it's staggering to me, it's just, you can't make this stuff up. That these people, it's like any Jewish people I meet who are anti-gun, I think, 'Are you serious? Do you not remember what happened?' And why did that happen? Because they registered guns and then they took them."
"Why did you have to flee to this country in the first place?" the speaker continues. "Hello! Is anybody home here?"
Keith Dvorchik
And for this alleged "transgression," Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle President Keith Dvorchik called for Brian Judy's resignation and screeched for the NRA to reject his "ignorant and unproductive dialogue." Additionally, Dvorchik, in his reactionary and hysterical ignorance demanded the NRA disavow Judy's purported remarks and called the idea that the systematic persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany had anything to do with the Seattle's background check measure "idiotic, simplistic and simply wrong."
Dvorchik also sanctimoniously claimed that to question whether Jews, who lost six million people in the Holocaust, understand history is the "most vile rhetorical question that has ever been asked."
In other words – don't question Dvorchik. His expertise is not to be doubted, because he's Jewish and HOLOCAUST! Even if his alleged judgment is flawed and filled with ignorance and refusal to acknowledge history and accept the reality that gun control played a vital role in the victimization of Jews in Nazi Germany, as well as in subsequent statist, tyrannical nations such as the USSR.
Well, Dvorchik's refusal to acknowledge reality does not negate its existence.
Initiative 594 is redundant, unneeded, and will very likely lead to the demise of legal private gun sales in Washington state. After all, inserting a licensed dealer and the government into every private firearms sale, along with the accompanying fees, paperwork, and waiting periods, which, by the way, would be doubled should this initiative become law, will render the sale cumbersome, more costly and not private at all. It would add a layer of government bureaucracy to the basic right to sell your property and reduce that basic right to a government-granted privilege.
Add to this the fact that the vast majority of criminals don't bother with legal transactions, but rather get their firearms the old fashioned way – illegally – bypassing the background check altogether, and it is quite clear that Initiative 594 is meant to simply outlaw private gun sales in Washington state.
As onerous as that sounds, many can't see how this relates to the Holocaust or to the abuses that Jews suffered in Germany. Liberals claim that the German Weapons Law of 1938 actually loosened the Weimar Republic's strict gun control laws, and therefore the claim that Hitler's gun control efforts somehow led to the Holocaust is specious at best and an outright lie at worst.
It is true that the 1938 Weapons Law in Germany did, in fact, loosen firearms restrictions. It deregulated the purchase and transfer of rifles and shotguns. Handguns were still strictly regulated, however. The age for legal possession was lowered from 20 to 18, and permits became valid for three years, instead of one year as they were under the Weimar Republic. Additionally, if you worked for the government, or were a member of the Nazi party, or a hunter the 1938 weapons law exempted you from gun ownership restrictions.
While the manufacture of firearms and ammunition required a permit, do you know who couldn't get said permit? Jews. Nor could any company even partly owned by Jews.
Not only that, but the Germans engaged in an aggressive disarmament campaign against Jews, seeking to ensure they could not defend themselves or resist their tyranny. They didn't just prohibit Jews from possessing firearms, but also "truncheons or stabbing weapons," wrote Bernard Harcourt, law professor at the University of Chicago in 2004.
The Minister of the Interior, Frick, passed Regulations Against Jew's Possession of Weapons on November 11, 1938, which effectively deprived all Jews of the right to possess firearms or other weapons. It was a regulation prohibiting Jews from having any dangerous weapon—not just guns. Under the regulations, Jews "are prohibited from acquiring, possessing, and carrying firearms and ammunition, as well as truncheons or stabbing weapons.
Those now possessing weapons and ammunition are at once to turn them over to the local police authority." Moreover, prior to that, the German police and Nazis used the 1938 firearms law as an excuse to disarm Jews. In Breslau, for instance, the city police chief decreed the seizure of all firearms from Jews on the ground that "the Jewish population 'cannot be regarded as trustworthy'"—the language from the 1928 and 1938 firearms laws.
By ensuring that the government controlled the means of production of firearms, as well as the licensing and transfer of guns (save for members of the Nazi, party, government workers and other members of the trusted class), the Germans were able to deny said permits and ability to purchase to anyone they wanted - in this case, the Jews.
The moment you give any government the ability to control your access to firearms, you leave open the possibility – no matter how small – that a certain class of people will be denied that access, leaving them unable to defend themselves and powerless to stand up to said government.
And by eliminating private firearms sales, that is exactly what Initiative 594 aims to do – give the state control over every means of firearms access.
No, Initiative 594 is not intended to target Jews, but the idea is fundamentally the same: when the government eliminates the last legal means by which an individual can purchase a firearm without government permission, it gains the power to disarm anyone it wants (while the criminals continue to steal, borrow, or purchase guns on the black market cheaply, efficiently, and without reams of pre-requisite paperwork and waiting periods).
How does Dvorchik not understand this? How does he not understand that the history of the Jewish people shows that when a government has the power to control firearms purchases and deny them to any group of people it deems "dangerous," abuses and outright murder result?
Maybe he is too far removed from the horrors of the Holocaust, despite his self-righteous "I'm right because I'm Jewish, and my people suffered" pronouncements.
Maybe he doesn't understand that the abuses, cruelties and violence against Jews continued beyond the Holocaust – in every statist hellhole that had guns to wield over defenseless and defeated people.
I understand this. I've understood it since I was eight years old, and a Soviet border guard pointed his rifle in my face, as he led my father away to be searched and humiliated – their last act of exploitation and Jew abuse before we escaped the USSR in 1979.
I inherently understood then that we, the defenseless, would always be exploited and mistreated by those with the power to kill us.
I understood that without the means to resist, we would always be victims of those who had the firepower to subjugate us.
And I understand now that allowing police to decide whether or not you can exercise your fundamental right to defend your life gives them the authority to declare you unfit or untrustworthy or otherwise ineligible to exercise your rights.
Like the police chief in Breslau, Germany...
Brian Judy understands this, and Keith Dvorchik should get down on his ignorant knees and thank him for the reminder, since he, as the leader of a Jewish group – a group of people who are supposed to never forget the abuses they suffered at the hands of statists and tyrants – appears to have forgotten his own people's horrifying history.
Unfortunately he is too busy licking the hands of those who seek to disarm our people, to render them vulnerable and helpless, and deceive them into trusting a statist government that has no hope of effectively protecting them from violence, but has every means to render them unable to resist.
And instead of supporting our people's right to self-determination and self-defense, he lashes out at those who rightly point his ignorance.
Maybe Dvorchik is too busy worshipping at the lap of his statist politician masters to care about history... about reality... about the suffering of his own people as they were rendered defenseless by the very state that supposedly exists to protect them from violence.
Maybe he has naively fallen for the politicians', Michael Bloomberg's, and other hysterical nanny statists' "gun violence" agenda, and forgot that each of us has the right and the duty to protect our lives and the lives of our loved ones.
Well, JPFO remembers - thousands and thousands of Jews across the land - remember. We do not genuflect at the histrionics of those who bleat for the state to protect them, even as they give up the means to defend themselves from the state. We know where that leads, and we are accountable to every innocent who has suffered abuse at the hands of tyrannical despots and who has sworn to never allow those abuses to happen again.
Brian Judy was right.
Jews should be the last people to advocate for government control of their means of self-defense and resistance. They should remember the disarmed Jews who were deprived not just of the right to defend themselves, but also their very lives in Nazi Germany. They should remember the abuses they suffered at the hands of the Soviets.
And they should oppose efforts to give the government control of their means of self-defense in the United States, instead of disparaging and belittling those who remind them of what they've chosen to ignore and trying to get them fired for stating an inconvenient truth that doesn't jive with their political agenda.
Brian Judy should not apologize. He should stand strong on his convictions and remind Dvorchik and those like him that those who cannot or will not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
We, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership will never forget.
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Nicki Kenyon has been an avid gun rights advocate since she returned to the United States from an overseas Army tour in Germany. She began writing about Second Amendment issues in 2001 when KeepAndBearArms.com published her first essay, "The Moment.". She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Arts degree in National Security Studies from American Military University. Her area of expertise in those fields is European and Eurasian affairs. When not writing about gun rights or hanging out with her husband and son, she practices dry-firing her M1911 at the zombies of "The Walking Dead." Nicki Kenyon's Archive Page.
