Episode No. 139--Gun violence and what Judaism says we must do about it

At 10 a.m. this morning, when I recorded this episode, there already had been 2,266 people who died by guns so far this year. That number is now up to 2,294. That averages out to nearly two gun deaths every hour since the new year began.

Between January 1st and today, there have been 55 mass shootings and eight mass murders.

As of this morning, 37 children under the age of 11 had been killed by guns; it’s up to 38 now. It’s up for teenagers between ages 12 and 17. It was 172 this morning and it’s 173 now.

We are in the midst of a major gun violence crisis that must be addressed. That’s the subject of Episode No. 139.

Transcript

Episode No. 139--Gun Violence and What Judaism Says We Must Do About It

Welcome to Keep the Faith, the bi-weekly podcast in which contemporary issues are explored through the prism of Jewish law and tradition.

2024 is just 54 days old as of today, when this podcast episode airs, but as of 10 a.m. Eastern time yesterday when I recorded this episode, there have already been 2,266 people who died by guns so far this year. Another 3,892 people were injured by guns so far. That averages out to nearly two gun deaths and three gun injuries every hour since the new year began.

Between January 1st and this past Sunday, February 18th, there have been 56 mass shootings, meaning that at least four people, not including the shooter, were either injured or killed, according to the Gun Violence Archive. There have been eight mass murders during this brief period. A mass murder is defined as one in which four or more victims have been killed, again not including the shooter.

So far in 2024, 37 children under the age of 11 have been killed by guns, and another 72 were injured. Among teenagers between the ages of 12 and 17, 172 were killed, and 400 were injured. There also were 198 unintentional shootings.

And so, once again, the topic for this week is the epidemic of gun violence in America and what Jewish law has to say about how to deal with it.

We all know how to deal with it, but I’ll get to that.

We’ve all heard about the mass shooting during the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory rally a week ago Wednesday. One person was killed, and 22 others were injured in that incident which was apparently sparked by a personal feud that had nothing to do with the celebration.

Many of us, at least, probably also heard about two other mass shootings that took place, one on Sunday, February 11th in Houston, Texas, and the other just this past Sunday, February 18th, in Burnsville, Minnesota. Both got national media coverage, although not as extensive as the coverage given to the Kansas City incident.

Of the two, the Houston shooting came close to getting at least as much coverage as Kansas City because of where it took place—in Houston’s Lakewood Church, which is not just any church. Before it became a church, the building was known as the Compaq Center sports arena, and it can seat as many as 16,000 people at any one time. The church has around 45,000 members who physically attend one of its four weekly services.  Another 10 million people tune in to those services, which are led by the popular televangelist Joel Osteen. So anything untoward that happens there is going to get lots of media coverage.

That shooting may have a Jewish connection, as you’ll hear in a moment.

It began around 1:55 p.m. Houston time when a woman named Genesse Moreno, with her 7-year-old son in tow, opened fire with an AR-15 assault rifle inside the church’s hallway. Two off-duty police officers quickly returned fire, killing Moreno, and wounding her son in the head. He’s still in critical condition in a local hospital. A 57-year-old man was wounded in the leg.

While police have not yet announced a motive for the attack, the AR-15 Moreno used had a sticker with the words “Free Palestine” written on it, and Pastor Osteen is known to be a big supporter of the State of Israel, so the Gaza War may have played a role in the attack.

Another possible Jewish connection is the bad blood that apparently existed between Moreno and her ex-husband’s Jewish family, as evidenced by some anti-Semitic letters she wrote to them during their bitter divorce.

Then again, Moreno’s motive may have had nothing to do with anything Jewish. She had a long history of mental health problems and an equally lengthy criminal history going back to 2005.

In the Burnsville shooting this past Sunday, a heavily armed man had barricaded himself in a home full of children—his children, no less. Police and emergency paramedics responded to a domestic dispute call. The man opened fire, and within minutes, two police officers and a paramedic lay dead, which is why it got some national media coverage. Another officer was injured in the shootout, and the shooter was also killed.

If these were the only mass shootings between February 11th and February 18th, it would be bad enough, but sadly this is just the tip of the gun violence iceberg. So many other mass shootings don’t rate national news coverage. We’re averaging more than one mass shooting a day so far this year. 

As I said at the beginning, we all know how to deal with it—or at least we should know. We need stronger laws, something Republicans and even many Democrats in Congress oppose despite the fact that survey after survey shows that a majority of Americans, Republicans included, do favor stricter gun laws of one kind or another.

A Pew Research Center survey, I believe it was conducted in 2019, showed that 93 percent of Democrats and 82 percent of Republicans favored background checks for private gun sales and sales at gun shows.

87 percent of Democrats and 54 percent of Republicans favored banning high-capacity magazines, the kinds that are capable of holding more than either 10 or 15 rounds of ammunition. Some hold well over 100 bullets at a time.

As for banning assault-type weapons, such as the AR-15 and its descendants, 88 percent of Democrats were in favor and so were 50 percent of Republicans at the time of that survey.

Most telling, perhaps, is a poll conducted by Fox News, no less, in June 2022, which had results not unlike the 2019 Pew survey. Fox had conducted a similar poll in October 2021, which found that 52 percent of Americans favored stricter laws. But the June 2022 poll found that the number had jumped to 66 percent—an increase of 14 points in just eight months.

The June 2022 Fox poll also found that 90 percent supported background checks for all gun buyers, 81 percent supported taking guns away from people who pose a danger to themselves or to others, 60 percent supported a ban on assault rifles and semi-automatic weapons, and 53 percent supported a ban on high-capacity magazines.

If even Fox News comes up with numbers like that, we should expect Members of Congress to be falling all over themselves trying to pass such legislation, but that’s not the case.

In March 2021, for example, when the House still had a Democratic majority, it narrowly managed to pass the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, but that bill was never voted on by the Senate because 60 votes were required to bring it up for debate, but 54 votes senators voted to do so.

When it comes to gun control legislation, the public at large is not as important to Members of Congress, it seems, as is the National Rifle Association, which spends many millions of dollars each national election cycle supporting some candidates and opposing others. In 2022, it spent $11.7 million on that election. Even though the NRA is beset by serious legal problems and internal disputes these days, it still packs a powerful financial punch.

Besides the constantly and unacceptably high annual death tolls and injury rates, here’s another statistic Members of Congress choose to ignore.

We Americans make up fewer than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet we own 46 percent of all guns in the world. There was a small arms survey conducted some years ago that found that there are about 120 firearms for every 100 people in the United States—a number that’s much larger than in any other country in the world.

This becomes more frightening when we take into account this finding from a 2016 study conducted by the American Journal of Medicine, which I’ve cited in previous episodes on gun violence. While the United States has only half the population of the other 22 high-income nations combined that were included in that study, yet Americans are 10 times more likely than people anywhere else in the world to die from a firearm death overall.

We’re 25 times more likely to be killed violently by a gun, six times more likely to be accidentally killed by a gun, and eight times more likely to commit suicide using a gun.

This is not about the Second Amendment. This is not about the right to bear arms. To use a favorite argument of the strict constructionists on the political right, it is about what our founding fathers meant when they wrote the Second Amendment. They had in mind single shot rifles and guns. They couldn’t even have conceived of an automatic weapon that can shoot 800 rounds per minute, over 13 rounds per second, as the AR-15 can do, for example. Does anyone seriously think they would have written the Second Amendment the way they did if they could have conceived of such weapons?

The NRA calls the AR-15 QUOTE America’s Rifle. UNQUOTE Its needle-nosed bullet travels at nearly three times the speed of sound. Twenty-two years ago, in 2012, for example, it took less than five minutes for a shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School to fire 154 rounds, killing 20 children and six adults.

The AR-15 is the NRA’s weapon of choice for hunters and sports shooters. Seriously, does anyone really need to shoot 800 rounds to bring down a quail? Does anyone really need to shoot 800 rounds to shoot cans off a fence in target practice?

Obviously, the NRA thinks people do, as do many Members of Congress, Democrats as well as Republicans.

So do the gun manufacturers. Just look at the ads they run to promote their assault weapons—and that’s what they are, ASSAULT weapons. The gun companies don’t hide the fact, even if the NRA loves to do so.

In one full-page ad some years ago—and by the way, it was this ad that influenced the Sandy Hook shooter to buy his AR-15—Bushmaster, which makes the weapon, had almost nothing written on the page. The ad had a white background, with a photo of an AR-15 on the right top third of the page, and just five words beside it to the left: QUOTE Consider your man card reissued. UNQUOTE: Imagine: We need a weapon that shoots 800 rounds a minute to establish our manhood credentials.

Bushmaster had other ads, one of which was for something called an ACR, which should be a strictly military product for military use—the letters ACR, in fact, stand for Adaptive Combat Rifle. Remington’s ACR was manufactured for military use, but the company nevertheless advertised it in general publications.

Bushmaster didn’t even bother to hide its intended audience. Its ACR ad carried this line: QUOTE In a world where survival of the fittest can mean survival at all, no rifle is a better fit than the one-of-a-kind, all-new Bushmaster ACR. UNQUOTE

Ask yourselves what “survival of the fittest” in that print ad is supposed to mean. You may be even more horrified if you do.

An ACR can shoot as many as 800 rounds a minute. In a TV ad for its ACR, Bushmaster apparently does think we need to shoot 800 rounds to bring down a quail. In that ad, it called its ACR QUOTE The most reliable and adaptable modern sporting rifle ever built. UNQUOTE

The ACR was actually created in 2006 by another company—Magpul Industries, located in Austin, Texas. Bushmaster and Remington only license the weapon. Magpul’s original name for its ACR, I’m sorry to say, was the Masada, named after the Judean fortress that was built in the First Century Before the Common Era, or B.C.E.

Masada was the site of the mass suicide of its defenders in the First Judean-Roman War. The leader of those defenders, at least according to the historian Josephus, supposedly gave a stirring speech before the suicides in which he said QUOTE Masada shall never fall again. UNQUOTE Today, Israeli soldiers go to Masada and make that same pledge. “Masada shall not fall again.”

Calling its ACR the Masada, then, should give you a good idea of what the gun is really meant for, and then add that “survival of the fittest” claim and it just becomes even more horrifying.

So now let’s look at what Jewish law, starting with the Torah, has to say and how what it says was interpreted by our Sages of Blessed Memory and the rabbis who came after them.

As I noted in my last podcast and in so many others, Judaism puts the preservation of life above almost every one of its laws, starting with the Torah’s laws.

One such Torah law requires a person who’s building a house to build a parapet around the roof. That law is found in Deuteronomy Chapter 22, verse 8. It states that this must be done QUOTE that you should not bring any blood upon your house if any man falls from there. UNQUOTE 

As I’ve said many times on these podcasts, Torah law is more like chapter headings than actual law. It sets up a category under which other laws fall.

So it is with the Parapet law. Rabbinic decisions make clear that this law is subject to the broadest interpretation possible. Thus, we’re told in the Babylonian Talmud tractate Bava Kama that it’s not even permissible to keep a damaged ladder in our homes because of the Parapet law.

Maimonides, in his Mishneh Torah, The Laws of Murder and the Preservation of Life, Chapter 11, explains that the Parapet law includes QUOTE everything that is inherently dangerous and could, in normal circumstances, cause a person to die. UNQUOTE Anything that fits that bill requires a QUOTE parapet UNQUOTE to be built around it, meaning that every effort must be extended to prevent the item from causing an unintentional death.

Other commentators also note, as Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch did in the late 19th century, that the Torah’s “parapet” law even requires QUOTE local civil authorities to intervene to have anything at all that might be dangerous removed UNQUOTE from a person’s premises, despite the fact that the Torah elsewhere insists on an individual’s right to privacy.

Weapons, of course, are made with the intention that they can kill. A police officer or a soldier in wartime requires a gun that will perform its deadly task efficiently and with all possible speed if the circumstances require it.

Remington’s ACR, for example, which it licensed from Magpul for sale to the military qualifies, but the same can’t be said for the civilian-licensed Bushmaster ACR.

A homeowner or storekeeper, for whom a gun is supposedly meant to provide psychological comfort and who supposedly expects the gun to deter crime, without having to employ its deadly power, has no need for an ACR or any other such gun.

A distinction thus must be made between the offensive weapon and the defensive one—an AR-15, for example, or an ACR, versus a Colt single-action revolver. While a “parapet” is required for both, the nature of the protective device is necessarily different for each.

The offensive military weapon should be safe enough to reasonably protect against mishaps, but not so encumbered that it’s virtually useless in the field. The defensive weapon should also be able to be used if the need arises, God forbid, but the degree of safety against mishaps must be greater, and the level of its firepower must be much lower.

With this in mind, it’s possible to argue that guns intended for self-defense or even for sport shooting must have the best available protection against accidental or unauthorized use, or else they shouldn’t be manufactured. Certainly, if they are manufactured without such devices, no one should purchase them.

There are safety features available for guns, but to date, there are no handguns out there that provide what I’d consider halachically adequate “parapets.” That technology is available, though, and better technology is on the drawing boards, so it’s clear that such guns could be manufactured. Don’t hold your breath, though, expecting Congress to pass a law mandating that only such guns may be manufactured or sold in the U.S.

So what can we do? What must we do? What does Jewish law require us to do?

For one thing, if we own a gun or guns, we need to take extremely great care to keep such weapons from being used without adequate safeguards, and we especially need to keep them locked up in such a way that our children or any other unauthorized user can’t get to them at any time or in any way. As I noted earlier in this podcast episode tha as of Thursday at 10 a.m. Eastern time, there have been three gun injuries every hour so far in 2024. Those mainly occurred because of the lack of care for the guns involved, including keeping them safely locked away so that no unintended person could get hold of them.

Beyond that, we need to demand that Congress finally gets serious about passing gun control measures of every kind, including especially passing a ban on all types of automatic assault weapons and mandating that new guns must come equipped with the latest safety technology.

Death by guns has been called one of our most serious public safety issues, and I hope I demonstrated that to you in this episode. Jewish law demands that all of us must act and act now, and all of us must encourage others to act now, as well.

And given that this is a national election year, we need to thoroughly investigate where candidates stand on gun control issues, and then we must vote accordingly.

This is Rabbi Shammai Engelmayer. I hope you come back for my next podcast, and I’d like to hear what you have to say about this or my other podcasts. Go to www.shammai.o-r-g—w-w-w-dot-s-h-a-m-m-a-i-dot-o-r-g—and email, please.

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Shabbat Shalom. Stay healthy. Keep wearing those N95 masks in crowded situations even if no one else is, and, above all, stay safe.