How I became a gun person
It was Shani Louk’s mangled body that was keeping me from sleeping. She had been beautiful and bright, a real person, having a good time on a warm night. Then she was dead, her body mistreated, the girl gone. She could have been me. I used to dance all night at festivals under the stars too. She could be my daughter, in a few years, heading to a field to hear the music.
Or it was the Bibas family. I also have redheaded children. That could be me clutching my ginger boys, distraught, afraid, missing.
The days and months after October 7th caused sleeplessness like I had not experienced before. Wide eyed, middle of the night, a stress knot in my chest, a tightness I had never known.
When the panic of the first few days subsided, my sleeplessness took on a new pattern. It wasn’t fear or despair anymore. It was anger. “How could they have been so defenseless,” I’d ask myself in the dark, sick with the knowledge that our family would have been just as helpless as any family that day. They were me, I was them.
Inbar Lieberman was a name I’d come to repeat to myself. Inbar was 25 years old on October 7th and head of security at Nir-Am, a kibbutz near the Gaza border. On that day, Lieberman heard explosions nearby and ran to unlock the armory. Her quick thinking, but also specifically her weaponry, saved her kibbutz. Nir-Am suffered no losses that day.
I had long been a supporter of the Second Amendment but it had been entirely theoretical. I was born in the Soviet Union, came to the United States as a small child and embraced everything it meant to be American. You should absolutely have the right to own a gun. We are a free country of free men. The only way to maintain that freedom, as history has shown so often, is to be armed. I fully believed this. But growing up in Brooklyn meant I didn’t know anyone who actually exercised this right. If something happened, you were meant to call for help and hope for the best.
Unfortunately, I had the opportunity to test this call for help. In the last five years, my public image has increased and I have received several threats. I had gone to the police in Brooklyn for one explicit death threat, texted to my phone, but was told there wasn’t much they could do. I had walked into the police precinct ready to spend some time there, give a statement, help with clues. I was outside five minutes later. They didn’t even take down my information. No one was coming to save me.
When our family moved to Florida three years ago, I planned to get more serious about shooting and eventual gun ownership. But we got comfortable in Florida quickly. We felt secure and safe. My husband and I meant to go learn to shoot but never quite got around to it. Everything was so peaceful, it was hard to motivate towards owning guns. October 7th was the reminder: Peace ends quickly.
I knew Jews were changing on guns even before the 7th, I had written about it. But I myself had not changed yet. I had shot a gun only once before, four years prior, on my friend Will Cain’s property in Texas. He had shown me how to hold his shotgun correctly, that it wasn’t a bazooka to rest on top of my shoulder. It was fun but I had seen it as an outdoorsy activity like fishing or golfing. Thinking about shooting as a mechanism for saving our lives is a different sensation.
By October 13th, we were at the gun range. A girl walked out of the shooting area with a huge Star of David necklace and a Chanel bag. My people had gotten the message loud and clear.
In my Florida conservative media world, it was easy to get a better understanding of guns. Buck Sexton and his brother Mason took me to an outdoor course to practice with a variety of weapons. John Cardillo took us gun shopping for the first time and introduced us to the owner of an excellent gun store. Our “gun guy,” Manny, is mild mannered and an extremely polite gentleman. He could be your accountant but he sells the finest weaponry and shoots machine guns with a smile on the weekends. His calm and patient demeanor was helpful when we tried to figure out what we needed. He understands that we are afraid. He has seen a serious uptick in Jewish customers since the 7th.
Manny’s explanations are rational. He isn’t a loose cannon. He told us if you have the option to get away from a confrontation, that is always best. If you can not, you must be ready. He is blunt. He says things like “your handgun is there to get you to your real gun.” We internalized all of his advice. We have guns now, plural.
Once you become a gun owner, so many wrong ideas around guns come into clear focus. “Gun free zones” were always kind of funny, a bad guy will obviously ignore a sign as quickly as he will any number of laws, but they become absurd when you know the only time you’re going to know a good guy is carrying in a gun-free zone is when you’re thanking him. Or the idea that some guns should be illegal. None of the data on banning certain guns makes sense. Most gun deaths happen with handguns and over half of those are suicides. No one is taking my AR-15 because they want to “do something” about guns. And anyway, that gun was lost in a boating accident.
The gun owners we know take training very seriously and so do we. A gun is not a purchase you make and then stick in a drawer for a rainy day. Much like driving a car, learning how to shoot a gun takes practice and requires muscle memory. Unlike driving, a regular activity you do on good days and bad days, if the day ever comes that you will need to use your gun, it will likely be the worst, most stressful day of your life. The idea behind training is to get to a point where your muscle memory will take over, in chaos and fear, and you will know exactly what to do should it ever be required.
The more you train the less the whole thing feels like a joke. It stops being “tee-hee, I own a gun” and becomes a far more practical thing that you just do. How will you carry it? What feels comfortable? This gun or that gun.
“I thought you felt safe in Florida. Why have guns?” a visiting friend from Israel asked us. We do feel safe in Florida, especially as we watch the eruptions of Jew hatred in our old city. But the idea that New York City could become a hotbed of Jew-hatred was once far-fetched too. It’s exactly the “it could never happen here” feeling that has lulled so many Jews before me into complacency. We have not just been killed by our enemies in places like Israel. We’ve been killed by friends and neighbors, in Spain, in Poland and so on. Our guns say: not us, not this time.
There is no reason for a Jew not to be armed in 2024. So much of Jewish culture revolves around being the helper. We expect people to help those in trouble. We count on armed people to step in. When the call comes “someone should do something!” we don’t plan to wait around. That someone will be us.
“We aren’t ‘gun-people,’” some people say. There’s some pride in it. Who, me? Oh no, I don’t own guns, I’m not that kind of person. But unsaid is that the not-a-gun-person expects someone else with a gun to come and protect them at just the right moment. They count on police, security, military to come and help in a real crisis. The not-a-gun-person can never step up and stop a violent attack on someone, they can never protect others, can never be the hero themselves. They can save themselves, maybe, but they’ll never be the one that everyone turns to at a time of emergency. There’s something intrinsically anti-Jewish about this. We have an obligation to each other but the anti-gun Jew can’t meet it. That should be a source of shame not pride. You’re not just a not-a-gun-person. You’re a can’t-help person.
What I want is for my kids to say something else. Yes, we are gun people, actually. I want my kids to grow up shooting, to be good at it, to be comfortable with it, to know their role is not to wait for someone else. We’ll also deter. We send the most peace-bringing message of all: We own guns, we train with guns, we have an arsenal, you do not want it with us. We will help others, we will be the people that step in.
