Gun Guys (36 page)

Launching Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership before the dawn of the Internet was largely a matter of churning out newsletters and monographs, printed as cheaply as possible on thin newsprint with smeary ink. Aaron stumbled on to Theodore Haas, a Jewish survivor of the Dachau concentration camp, who couldn’t have been a more perfect poster child for the fledgling organization had Aaron created him from clay with his own hands like a golem. “There is no doubt in my mind that millions of lives could have been saved if the people were not ‘brainwashed’ about gun ownership and had been well armed,” Haas told Aaron in a clipped
mittel
european accent. As far as Aaron knew, Haas was the first Holocaust survivor publicly to draw a connection between German gun control and the horror that followed it.

Little by little, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership began attracting members, and, to Aaron’s satisfaction, most of them weren’t Jews. They were
goyim
, discovering a different kind of Jew than the one they’d expected. Aaron tried hard to keep the language of the newsletter, even letters to the editor, cordial. Readers began submitting articles, and Aaron insisted that they be footnoted; he was amazed to discover how many amateur scholars were out there, waiting for a chance to share their knowledge. A reader named Gus Cotey Jr. attempted to get inside the heads of those who would ban guns, identifying “The Seven Varieties of Gun Control Advocate” as Elitists, Authoritarians, Criminals, the Fearful, Ideological Chameleons, Security Monopolists (who want citizens disarmed “so that they can command high fees for protecting the citizenry”), and the Dysfunctionally Unworldly (“To them, tyranny and crime are things that happen in other places far removed from their ‘civilized’ universe”). A Utah psychiatrist named Sarah Thompson argued, in a paper Aaron published, that gun haters believe the worst about gun owners because they wouldn’t trust themselves with a gun. She urged gun owners to be gentle and non-argumentative when confronting them. Use “the mirror technique,” she advised, feeding back what they say “in a neutral inquisitive way,” then asking, “what makes you think that?”

“This was the plane onto which I wanted to elevate the gun debate,”
Aaron told me as he spooned up broth and avoided the wontons. “There was too much pointless shouting going on. I wanted to win the other side over, not merely enrage them.”

For all his theoretical interest in guns, Aaron had little practical interest in them. But since he was going on about the need to defend oneself, he figured he ought to go shoot. One afternoon in the early nineties, he dutifully drove to a nearby range and unpacked a few of his guns onto a shooting bench. The usual suspects—hefty
goyim
in overalls and feed caps—blasted away with the rifles and slug-loaded shotguns with which they’d hunt deer. But then, from off to the left, came the unexpected rip of a machine gun. Everybody stopped and peered down the line. Chopping away at his target with a big black machine gun of some kind—Aaron was never good on technology—was a fellow Jew, unmistakable by the nose, the beard, and the black suit. When the man took a break to reload, Aaron walked over and introduced himself. “Good afternoon,” the man said with a smile, and as he extended his hand, his jacket fell open to reveal two pistols jammed into his waistband.

“This was some Jew,” Aaron said with a wisp of a smile. “He didn’t have any accent, but he told me he’d been raised in Israel and said that American Jews were like the old joke. You know, two Jews standing against the wall, the Nazi soldiers are counting down, and one guy yells, ‘Hey, I want a blindfold.’ The other says, ‘Shush, Hymie, you’ll make them angry.’ ” Chuckling, Aaron spooned up a little rice, dipped the spoon into his broth, and brought it to his lips.

The Jew set down his machine gun, Aaron recalled, and began popping away with his pistols. First one hand, then the other, talking all the while. “My family”—
bang!
—“moved from Israel to a rough neighborhood of Cleveland”—
bang!
—“when I was just a kid”—
bang!
“All the Jews had already fled the neighborhood”—
bang!
—“so I stood out”—
bang!
His guns clicked empty, and he cocked his arms like a baseball player awaiting a pitch. “I started carrying a bat. ‘Mess with me and you’re going to die,’ I told the hoods, and I could see them thinking,
Is it worth messing with this crazy guy?
”

“It was all I could do not to kiss this guy,” Aaron told me. “When I mentioned JPFO, he said, ‘I like the sound of
that.’
His name was Gideon Goldenholz.
Rabbi
Gideon Goldenholz. Said he had a shul in Mequon, which was something in itself. Mequon was where the country club used to have a sign:
NO JEWS OR DOGS
.”

Aaron started attending synagogue for the first time in years, to hear
Goldenholz talk the talk from the bimah. “There is a strain of Judaism that yearns for peace at any cost,” Goldenholz told the congregation one Friday evening as Aaron sat in the pews. “Such Jews think that being powerless proves that they’re good in the eyes of God. Like, ‘We’re victimized because we’re a great people.’ ” Goldenholz leaned across the pulpit. “Well, let me tell you: I can be a
victimizer
also.” Aaron was thrilled.

Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership produced its first book in 1994:
Death by “Gun Control,”
examining nine twentieth-century genocides—in Cambodia, China, Guatemala, Nazi Germany, Rwanda, Ottoman Turkey, Uganda, the Soviet Union, and Zimbabwe—and the gun bans or restrictions that preceded them. Working with an attorney, Aaron carefully footnoted every chapter so that nobody could accuse him of making up facts. Time and again—as in his childhood history lessons, as in the movies—one group disarmed another before annihilating it.
This
, he thought, as he shipped boxes of
Death by “Gun Control”
around the country,
will blow open the gun-control debate like nothing before it. This
, he thought,
will give the lie, once and for all, to the fallacy that gun control saves lives. Death by “Gun Control”
was as solid as stainless steel, Aaron felt: factual, dispassionate, unignorable.

It was ignored.

Not by JPFO’s faithful, of course. They loved it. But the media—even the conservative media—didn’t touch it. Aaron was floored. He produced, next, a series of comic books about a kindly white-haired man named Gran’pa Jack, which included such titles as
Will “Gun Control” Make You Safer?, The United Nations Is Killing Your Freedoms!, Is America Becoming a Police State?, “Gun Control” Is Racist!
and
Do Gun Prohibitionists Have a Mental Problem?
He also self-published a novel,
The Mitzvah
—about a Jew who awakens to the cause and arms himself—and commissioned an attorney friend to write
Dial 911 and Die: The Shocking Truth About the Police Protection Myth
.

Then Aaron stumbled upon what he felt was the greatest imaginable smoking gun: a letter from Lewis C. Coffin, law librarian at the Library of Congress, to Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, on July 12, 1968. “Dear Senator Dodd: Your request of July 2, 1968, addressed to the Legislative Reference Service, for the translation of several German laws, has been referred to the Law Library for attention.” Dodd, who had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War—and who had been pushing for gun control since President Kennedy’s assassination—had asked the Library of Congress to
translate Hitler’s
1938 gun-control laws into English
. Aaron couldn’t believe it. Four months after Dodd got his translation, Congress passed his Gun Control Act of 1968, the first big federal gun law. When Aaron got ahold of the Library of Congress’s translation and compared it with the American law, he was aghast at the similarities. Both assumed that gun ownership was a government-granted privilege. Both required people to prove they were “reliable” before buying a gun. Both prohibited certain classes of people from doing so. Both required store owners to keep gun-sale records; the Nazis had used those records to round up privately held guns. Dodd seemed to have lifted whole phrases of the Nazi law word for word.

Zelman put together a book—
“Gun Control”: Gateway to Tyranny—
that opened with a photograph of Coffin’s letter to Dodd, so that nobody could question his linking of Nazi law to the Gun Control Act. On facing pages, he printed a translation of the Nazi law and the relevant text of the 1968 law so that readers could compare them. What could be clearer? America’s premier gun-control law was based on laws the Nazis had written to disarm the Jews before exterminating them. It was a solid-gold slam dunk.

Nobody paid attention.

Aaron sent it to Fox News. Nothing. He sent it to the
Washington Times
. Nothing. He sent it to Glenn Beck’s producers. “We’ll get back to you.” But they never did. Even the NRA ignored it. Aaron thought he understood: If the country acknowledged the Nazi roots of gun control, it would have to scrap it, and nobody wanted to do that. Even the supposed opponents of gun control, like the NRA, got too much out of it.

“He’s making two points,” I told Margaret that evening at the campsite as we boiled our cabbage and rice. “The first is that the gun is a symbol of how society regards the individual. To trust everybody with something that lethal is to bestow the ultimate in respect.”

“You think that respect is warranted?” she asked. “Those guys shooting the rocks at Green River?”

“I think Aaron would say that they acted like children with their guns because society treats them like children when it comes to guns.”

She looked at me over the top of her glasses.

“He wants to elevate society, I think, by elevating respect for the individual.
He’d probably say it’s a slow process, but that you start by summoning everybody to his most responsible adult self.”

“How about you summon your most responsible adult self and go get some water,” Margaret said, extending a jug. I hoofed it to the communal tap and back.

“His other point is that people are going to try to slaughter each other, and the way you prevent that is by …”

“Making sure
everybody
has guns.”

“Well, yes. Like the old mutually assured destruction.”

“How about
nobody
has guns?” Margaret asked. “Then this group can come throw rocks and that group can throw rocks back, until everybody gets tired.”

The rice was finished. We ate.

How
about
nobody has guns? It sounded good. No guns, no gun accidents. No guns, no gun murders. Two problems, though. One was that the country was saturated with guns, and they almost never wore out. Were government to impose the ultimate gun controller’s victory—a total ban on the manufacture, import, and sale of firearms—we’d still have about 270 million guns floating around—for decades. What if everybody were ordered to turn them in? Many wouldn’t. Then what? A nationwide door-to-door warrantless search?

And even if we could somehow rid ourselves of guns, how much good would that do? Russia had a murder rate four times that of the United States, with no legal private guns in circulation. I didn’t know how they were killing each other, but clearly the Russians’ breathtaking murder rate had little to do with their gun laws. Maybe ditto our higher-than-average murder rate.

The ubiquity of firearms in America tripped me up whenever I thought about ways to “control” them. The cold truth was that, given the number of guns in America and their longevity, there was no surefire way to keep guns from falling into the wrong hands. We could throw up obstacles—registration, waiting periods, background checks at gun shows—but would they do any good? Or rather—and this was a better way to ask the question—would they do
enough
good to make it worth alienating and enraging the 40 percent of Americans who liked guns enough to own them? Someone intent on evil would, for the next hundred years, probably be able to find a gun. And as Timothy McVeigh demonstrated so convincingly with his van full of heating oil and fertilizer—a gun wasn’t necessary.

Maybe Aaron was on to something by trying to change how we thought about who we were as citizens and people, instead of how we regulated inanimate pieces of metal.

At our last breakfast at the Mineshaft, Aaron seemed discouraged. “We have a Jewish newspaper in Milwaukee, the
Chronicle
, that’s written negative articles about me,” he said. “The Jewish Federation doesn’t like me. The ADL doesn’t like me.” He took a joyless sip of water. “At the shul we belong to now, I make a point of not talking about what I do, because there are Holocaust survivors there who argue with me, and I’m tired of having the argument. ‘Guns wouldn’t have made a difference,’ they say.” He shrugged, looking pained. “They won’t talk to me anymore.”

He set down his water glass and drove a long forefinger into the table, leaning across his untouched eggs. “But you know, in all the time we’ve been doing this, nobody’s ever said, ‘Oh, Zelman, you’re wrong, and here’s the proof.’ Time after time, the gun laws were there. The laws were enforced. And the genocides happened. Bodies don’t lie. And people who think it can’t happen here? Ask Japanese Americans, the American Indians, the African Americans. They’ll tell you it
can
happen here, because it already has.”
^*

W
hen I called the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department in January of 2011 to ask about pig-hunting regulations, the lady who answered the phone said, “There aren’t any.”

“Excuse me?”