"This is America. That can't happen here."

Via David "As an American Jew, I can attest to this utter aversion to the ownership of firearms by my relatives.  Every.  Single. One.  This goes far beyond their ingrained liberalism, already painful to me.  But this article "rang true".
When I bring up the coming economic collapse, war, the prudence of having even a small stockpile of food, and so on, they are eager - desperate - to change the topic.  It's as though they don't want to admit such a thing could happen again.  But that's the point of "Never again!"... to ENSURE it doesn't happen again.
There was a TV series a decade or so ago; "The Dark Side", whose intro had the voice-over "We live in the sunlit world of what we believe to be reality...".  And that's the point.  Most people, including myself, do not WANT to admit there is evil in the world, that things can fall apart, and so on.  Even people who have direct experience with this can swim in that river in Egypt.
For example, my in-laws are visiting.  My wife showed them the stockpile I'm building.  Understand, these people (including my wife) lived through the collapse of the USSR and the hardships that resulted.  Yet they think I'm crazy.  I, an American-born middle class kid who has never known a day of true hardship, grasp what's coming and what could be the case for my family instinctively - without needing to experience it first.
My in-laws, even though not Jewish, also are of the Shtetl mentality.  Hopefully I can inculcate into my kids some good-old, Yankee ingenuity as well as raw, American toughness and individuality."


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Not just for years but for decades I have been perplexed by the fact that American Jews are overwhelmingly anti-gun. Now they are not just indifferent to guns as they were when I was growing up 60 years ago, but today they are genuinely hostile to them. They are both in leadership positions of the movement to ban private ownership of all firearms as well as at the grass-roots level individually in favor of gun bans by over 10 to 1. After much thought I have arrived at what appears to be the explanation for this cultural aversion to firearms by most American Jews, and since I have never seen anything like this explanation in print anywhere, I thought it worth writing the following essay describing what for want of a better term I refer to as "the shtetl mentality."

I was raised in New York City and later in a New Jersey suburb of New York by Jewish parents who had no interest in firearms, nor did any members of my extended family. Like most boys in those pre-PC days I had toy guns, but BB guns were absolutely forbidden.

When I asked for one when I was 8, I was not told, "You're too young" or "Maybe when you're older." I was told, "Not in my house." As far as I knew, I was the only Jewish boy who asked for one.

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