Authors: Dan Baum
And that, in a nutshell, was what Aaron came to love about firearms and the freedom to own them: It was all about responsibility and respect. The fact that anybody could walk into a store and buy a powerful weapon with no questions asked, or order one through the mail, bespoke a rational esteem for adults’ self-possession and sense of right and wrong. If you could be trusted to walk down the street, you could be trusted to own and carry a gun. And the converse was equally true: If you couldn’t be trusted to own a gun, perhaps you shouldn’t be on the street.
Sure, there’d be a shooting in Tucson every now and then, but never among the people in Aaron’s world. It was the bad element getting up to no good, and they did that whether they had guns or not. Nobody suggested a connection between the availability of guns and the occasional shooting. You might as well have argued that barbed wire caused windstorms.
Aaron met me at the Mineshaft, a big saloon-style restaurant in downtown Hartford, Wisconsin, about an hour from Milwaukee. He was six foot seven and achingly thin; in a big straw hat, he looked a little like Pete Seeger. Behind thick glasses, his eyes were huge and mournful. He sat with a slight groan. Bad enough being sixty-four years old and spindly; he also had a problem with his
kishkes
that needed surgery. A chubby blond waitress took our orders with chirpy single-mindedness, high on either Jesus, methamphetamine, or the sheer joy of being alive at six in the morning. I hated to do it, since I was breakfasting with a conservative Jew, but I ordered the Gold Digger—three eggs, a six-ounce smoked pork chop, and home fries. Margaret and I, economizing madly, were camped in a national forest at the edge of town and for a week had been eating nothing but the single-pot rice-and-cabbage gruel that we could cook on our camp stove. I was starting to digest my own stomach. Aaron,
for all his plumbing trouble, ordered the Golden Skillet: three eggs over American fries, ham, green pepper, onion, and mushroom, topped with hollandaise sauce. Hold the ham.
“I bought all that business about seeing the world and joined the Navy in 1964,” he said with a faint trace of a smile. “I never got any farther than Oakland. They made me a corpsman at the Oak Knoll medical center. The amputee center was there—Vietnam was getting started—and I had the chance to see eighteen-year-olds like me missing their arms and legs, with colostomy bags hanging …” His face darkened, and he flapped a hand to shudder away the memory. “It made me very anti-violence. Not a pacifist—not against the war. Being raised right after World War Two, I grew up with a strong sense of needing to fight evil, and I believed the domino theory.”
For Aaron, freedom wasn’t just a slogan to go along with a bunch of silly flag waving. Freedom was the mechanism for raising mankind to its full potential, because when people were truly free, power wasn’t concentrated in a few leaders. Everybody, in charge of his own destiny, became his own leader. Rejecting violence and supporting the war against the Communists’ attempt to subjugate South Vietnam by violence, then, weren’t contradictory. They were part of a unified vision in which nobody allowed himself to be a victim, and every man rose to the challenge of managing his own affairs. It wasn’t a matter of choosing between the sovereignty of the individual and the good of the collective. A society composed of confident, self-reliant individuals was a naturally more efficient and just collective, in the same way that a machine worked better with high-quality parts.
“I left the Navy in 1966, and all I wanted to do was veg for a while. I remember sitting in a barbershop in San Francisco and picking up a copy of
Guns & Ammo
. I wasn’t such a big gun lover—I didn’t even own a gun by then—but I needed something to read. In it was a piece about what became the Gun Control Act of 1968. I couldn’t believe it.”
Frightened by the mid-sixties riots and the assassination of President Kennedy, Congress was planning to ban mail-order gun sales and gun sales to those who had a criminal record or who had received psychiatric care. To make that possible, the feds would require gun buyers to fill out a government form with their name and address.
What infantile nonsense
, Aaron had thought as he waited for his haircut—to pretend that government could confront violence by making rules about guns. Guns didn’t cause violence, and the people who committed
violence with guns didn’t respect laws. If the country was so violent, why was Congress trying to make it harder for citizens to defend themselves? Worst of all, the National Rifle Association was helping write the law.
Aaron stopped talking and looked at me, waiting for a question, but I was distracted by what was going on outside the picture window behind him. It seemed to be getting darker, not lighter, as the morning progressed. “So that’s when you got involved?” I finally asked.
“No. I had a career to start. I got a job selling brassieres. Did very well. So well, they offered me my own territory: Detroit or Milwaukee. Detroit in 1967—imagine. I came here.”
Our breakfasts arrived, food enough for twelve on plates the size of manhole covers. Aaron stared at his steaming plate, sighed, picked up his fork, and couldn’t bring himself to use it. He seemed to enjoy ordering big breakfasts more than eating them; perhaps he’d been a robust eater and was still surprised by his new lack of appetite.
“Every time there was a push for more gun control, the people behind it were Jews,” he said. “Howard Metzenbaum, Charles Schumer, Dianne Feinstein—she’s the granddaughter of Polish Jews! That they could support the disarming of civilians, after what had happened to Jews in Europe, always seemed to me the worst kind of myopic self-delusion. Jews have been on the wrong end of the gun, the crossbow, and the sword forever.” He set down his unused fork and took a sip of water. “It’s that fawning desire for acceptance that’s always our downfall. Oh, please,
like
us! The Democratic Party is very anti-gun, the Jews want a home in the party, so they go along.”
It took Aaron until he was forty-five to get started as an activist. One night in 1991, after doing the dishes and putting their sons to bed, he and his wife, Nancy, sat at their farmhouse kitchen table and talked. “She asked me, ‘What is it you really want to do?’ And I said, ‘I want to destroy gun control.’ Not resist further restrictions on guns; not negotiate easier concealed-carry permits or fewer gun-free zones; not mince around with ‘common-sense’ gun laws. What I wanted was to do away with all gun laws,
period
.” Appetite momentarily summoned, Aaron picked up the fork and took a mouthful of eggs.
He wanted the world back the way it was when he was a kid—when you could go into a store and buy any gun you wanted and walk out with it without asking anyone’s permission. When you could carry a gun openly or concealed, as you saw fit. When you could pick a gun out of a mail-order catalog and have it sent to your house with nobody keeping
a record of it. Not because he was such a lover of guns, but because free access to firearms was, for him, the ultimate sign of respect for the individual.
The NRA, he knew, was never going to bring about such a world. It had helped write the Gun Control Act of 1968, after all, and its opening position was “Let’s enforce the gun laws we have.” Aaron didn’t want to enforce the gun laws. He wanted to wipe them off the books. “The NRA doesn’t want to end gun control; then where would it be?” he said to me, looking around on his plate for something he could tolerate putting in his mouth. “The NRA cares about one thing only: the NRA.”
What the American gun debate needed, he’d decided back in 1989, was an anchor—one organization about whose position nobody ever had to guess, a place where people could go for scholarly, historical evidence of the evils of gun control.
I started to ask about his interpretation of the Second Amendment, but he cut me off.
“Second Amendment this, Second Amendment that. What if the Second Amendment were repealed? I’m talking about something that precedes the Second Amendment by eons. I’m talking about something that comes from
God
. I’m talking about preserving
life
. For Jews, that’s more than a right; in the Bible, it’s an obligation.”
“So
no
gun law? Not even, I don’t know, keeping felons from getting them?”
“
I
never thought felons shouldn’t be able to get guns,” Aaron said, as though to imply,
What idiot would?
“First of all, ex-felons are just that. Ex. They’ve paid their debt and shouldn’t be considered second-class citizens with fewer rights than you and I enjoy. Second, when did a criminal ever have a problem getting a gun? By definition, the only people impacted by laws are the ones who obey the law. Criminals aren’t hamstrung by the system at all.”
What Aaron wanted to show the world was that not all American Jews were as willing to shuffle off to the boxcars as Charles Schumer apparently was. So he called his new organization Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. Its logo—a red-white-and-blue Jewish star flanked by a musket and a machine gun—was electrifying when it appeared in his first propaganda attack: a full-page ad in
Gun Week
that read “Not all Jews are stupid and pro-criminal, but Charles Schumer is both.” He put a fragment of potato in his mouth and chewed it thoroughly, framed by
that oddly dark window. No doubt about it: The sun seemed to be setting at 8:00 a.m.
Aaron had no illusions about how a lot of
Gun Week
readers felt about Jews—especially given that Jews led the fight to take away peoples’ guns. He figured that his ad would be a wake-up call for gun guys everywhere. They’d see that not all Jews wanted guns taken away, even if the most visible Jews did. It was time to make Jews the gun guy’s friend, Aaron felt, instead of his enemy. That was the path to the Jews’ long-term survival.
“The point we want to make is that those who support gun-control schemes rely on man’s law to justify what they’re doing,” Aaron said, leaning urgently across the table. “By bringing up God’s law, we’re putting God’s law and man’s law at loggerheads, which puts Sarah Brady and Charles Schumer in the position of saying that God’s law means nothing.”
Well
, I thought,
when it comes to federal legislation, God’s law does mean nothing
. At least that’s how I read the First Amendment.
The waitress came around with the coffeepot. “Y’all hear about the tornado coming?” she said.
I jumped up. Margaret was in the campsite, probably asleep, with no car and no radio. I threw money on the table and asked Aaron if we could continue later.
This is what I get
, I thought,
for questioning the supremacy of God’s law
.
No tornado hit, but we endured a morning of biblical rain from which Margaret and I hid in a movie theater. Among the others taking refuge was a studious-looking man of about forty, with glasses and a Vandyke.
“I don’t have a gun, but I’ve been thinking I should get one,” he said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It just seems like a good skill to have. Seems like something I ought to know how to do.”
“You thinking rifle or handgun?”
“Oh, a rifle. I grew up in New Hampshire, where everybody hunted except my family.”
“So you’re thinking you might hunt?”
“No, probably not. It’s more wanting to know how to shoot. I’d like my son to know, too. I think of it as something we could do together. Not knowing how to shoot makes me feel a little inadequate as a man.”
I wondered whether to take that as an expression of Wisconsin norms or what the feminists called phallic projection—or maybe simply the efficacy of gun advertising. It was mawkishly candid, though, and from a complete stranger in a half-lit movie theater.
“I can’t own a firearm,” said a voice to our left. We turned to find a clean-cut-looking man in his late twenties, wearing a jeans jacket and a blond Brylcreem bouffant.
“Why not?” Margaret said.
He frowned at us so long, I felt like a fool.
“Something in your past?” Margaret said.
“Duh. But we’re filing the papers. I mean, once you’ve paid, you’ve paid, right?”
“Can you vote?” I asked. The Supreme Court had upheld felony disenfranchisement in 2005, and nine states temporarily barred ex-felons from voting, while both Kentucky and Virginia struck them from the rolls for the rest of their lives.
“I’m from Michigan,” he said. “You can vote there once you’re off paper. No guns, though. Forever. Can you believe it?”
I could.
“I mean, imagine you’re told no First Amendment rights forever, just because you did something stupid once. Who’d put up with that?”
“I guess they figure guns are dangerous and words aren’t.”
He rocked back in exaggerated alarm. “What happened to ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’?” He leaned forward. I thought I smelled whiskey, at 11 a.m.; maybe he wasn’t so clean-cut. “Can’t have it both ways, can you?” he whispered nastily.
The lights went off, and we were blasted with an overamplified and explosive trailer for
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One
. By the time its two minutes and forty seconds were over, I felt like I’d spent the morning outside in the storm.
When we stepped outside two hours later, the world looked as though it had brushed its teeth. Everything sparkled in extra-vivid relief. The sky was cloudless, the air scrubbed of its moisture. I could count individual leaves on trees a block away. Within an hour, though, the heat started rising and the morning’s rain began evaporating in visible tendrils. Margaret was irritated by
The Kids Are All Right
—for all its au courant lesbian-marriage setting, she thought it reinforced a stultifying
Leave It to Beaver
morality. She was in a surly mood that probably wasn’t improved by being
left to rebuild camp alone in a sea of muddy pine needles. By the time I drove back into town to meet Aaron, the sky was ashen. We’d chosen Hartford’s other restaurant, a dark Chinese place with a murky fish tank by the door. He ordered wonton soup and a bowl of boiled rice; I, wincing again in apology, a plate of spicy ginger pork.