NRA Board Member Ted Nugent has rightly been roundly excoriated for on his Facebook page posting a composite image showing under Israeli flags 16 Jews (14 men and two women) with such identifiers as “Jew York City” Mayor Michael Bloomberg and “Israel Firster” Alan Dershowitz—all supposedly guilty of trying to strip the rest of us of “the basic human right of self defense.”
Nugent has so far refused to apologize or resign for his conjuring up of anti-Semitic psychopathologies redolent of an earlier era when the Nazis strode Europe and Freud dissected Hitler’s appeal.
Freudian categories that these days are frequently derided in this case perfectly fit. The Jewish conspiracy to rob Gentiles of their guns is of a piece with medieval and modern images of Jews as castrators of men as well corruptors of women or as agents of the destruction of traditional gender roles and morality.
There is a conservative gun rights lobby—Jews for the Protection of Gun Rights (JPGR)—that will no doubt stand up for Nugent’s conclusions if not the anti-Semitic packaging. Here, too, psycho-dynamics seem to be at work. JPGR’s unique contribution to the gun control vs. gun rights debate is the argument that gun control was a Nazi plot to leave German Jews defenseless on the way to the Holocaust. Amidst the paranoid hype, there is a scintilla of truth mixed in here in that in the 1930s the Nazis did indeed sometimes defame and disarm Jewish gun owners.
Since the time of Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, some Jews have been preoccupied with advancing the cause of “muscle Jews” or “tough Jews”: whether German Jewish collegians (like the young Arthur Koestler) committed to dueling, to Jewish boxers, or even to Jewish criminals (e.g., “Bugsy” Siegal) chronicled by Rich Cohen.
On the other hand, I see a similarity between anti-war “warriors” who aggressively, occasionally violently protested the Vietnam War and gun control advocates who sometimes now appear to be trying to be “tougher” and at least as loud as the gun rights crusaders. Jews on the left have had a felt need of their own to show that you can be “macho” even when opposing war and favoring civil disarmament.
On the other hand, I’m struck by the reticence of both sides in this debate to fully play the race card. Second Amendment defenders do point out that, during the post-Civil War battles over black rights in the South, there was a concerted campaign to disarm African American freedmen. (In fact, in at least one case a Jewish merchant was lynched in Tennessee allegedly for trying to arm blacks.)
Yet one, so far as I am aware, never hears the counterargument that African Americans are disproportionately the victims of black-on-black homicide by guns in America, and that pacifying inner city neighborhoods by stripping them of guns (to the extent this could be done under the Second Amendment) would save many black lives. The problem is that any white liberal who advocated this controversial form of gun disarmament would be pilloried as a racist—perhaps by a new organization: Black Guns Matter!
P.S. Thanks to Berger in Comments for correction about JPFO as well as Bloomberg cite. I would not expect Bloomberg to repeat the proposal if he runs for president. Also, I would like to have a dollar for every illegal gun on the inner city streets of NY or LA.
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