Gun Control: A Jewish Moral Imperative Rabbi Van Lanckton Temple B nai Shalom Braintree, Massachusetts July 28, 2012 Erev Tisha B Av

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1 Gun Control: A Jewish Moral Imperative Rabbi Van Lanckton Temple B nai Shalom Braintree, Massachusetts July 28, 2012 Erev Tisha B Av Four months ago, James Eagan Holmes began to accumulate guns, and ammunition, and body armor. By last Friday, he had acquired an entire arsenal: a Smith & Wesson AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a pump-action double-barreled twelve-gauge Remington shotgun, and a Glock.40-caliber semiautomatic pistol. Holmes bought all these weapons lawfully, in his own name, in person. No law prevented him. Holmes also purchased in the same four months, by mail order over the Internet, 3,000 rounds of handgun ammunition, 3,000 rounds for the semiautomatic rifle, and 350 shells for the shotgun. Six thousand, three hundred and fifty bullets. All purchased legally. None of these activities alerted any law enforcement agency. No law required the sellers to submit information about these purchases to anyone in authority. The Department of Homeland Security does not maintain any oversight that would have called this activity to its attention. Last Friday night, Holmes drove the few blocks from his apartment in Aurora, Colorado, to the Century 16 multiplex theater. He bought a ticket to one of the two showings there of the midnight premiere of the latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight. He entered the theater unarmed. Holmes took a seat in the front row of the theater. He waited there until about twenty minutes into the movie. Then he got up and left the theater through an emergency exit door near the front of the theater, next to the screen. As he left, he propped the door open, so he could get back in. So far as we know, nobody noticed him do this. Ten minutes later, at 12:38 a.m., Holmes came back into the theater through that same unguarded emergency exit door. Now he was wearing a gas mask, a load-bearing vest, a ballistic helmet, bullet-resistant leggings, a throat protector, and a groin protector. This is full body armor of a type worn by police SWAT teams. Holmes was carrying the rifle, the shotgun and the pistol. They were fully loaded. His advance planning had included equipping his weapons with extra- Page 1 of 6

2 large magazines. These enabled him to fire hundreds of bullets without stopping to reload. According to federal authorities, Holmes called out, I am the Joker. (The Joker is the evil super villain who is the archenemy of Batman in the comics and movies.) Holmes had painted his hair a bizarre orange red. Holmes released a smoke or gas bomb up the aisle of the theater. Nobody had yet moved to stop him. Some witnesses later said they thought this was a prank or a publicity stunt by the theater as part of the premiere of the movie. Holmes then fired bullet after bullet after bullet into the crowd. He killed at least twelve people. He wounded at least 58. He then left the theater through that same open emergency exit door. Police arrived at 12:41 a.m., less than three minutes after the attack started. They found Holmes outside at the rear of the theater, standing by his car. He surrendered peaceably. There were seventy victims. Twelve killed; 58 wounded. That is by far the largest number of victims of any of the tragically many mass shootings in United States history. This evening we begin the observation of Tisha B Av. The ninth day of Av. On this day Jews have suffered many calamities and acts of destruction. This is a special time for us to mourn the victims murdered and maimed by James Holmes. It is also a time to consider the attitude of Jewish law and tradition to the question of how a society can and should protect itself against such attacks. I am indebted to Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz for his analysis of gun control issues that are reflected in Jewish sources. Of course, the rabbis of the Talmud did not have guns. But they were aware of threats to life in their own society. They set forth clear rules that we can apply to getting control over the easy availability of weapons and ammunition that have no purpose other than to kill and wound human beings. We begin with the very high value our sources place on making sure that others are safe. Chapter 22 of Deuteronomy includes a warning to home owners. The houses in that time had flat roofs and people often spent time there. The Torah requires every home owner to erect a barrier at the edge of the roof, a wall to prevent people from falling off. The rabbis in the Talmud expand this idea to a general directive to remove any safety hazard. Rabbinic authorities in our own time include in this Page 2 of 6

3 commandment an employer's responsibility to ensure occupational safety, as well as an injunction against reckless driving. Someone who refuses to remove a safety hazard can be punished by being excluded from the Jewish community. In general, safety regulations are treated with far greater stringency than any other subject of halakhah. Any Jewish view of gun control would therefore place high value on safety. There is more. In the Talmud, there are specific regulations that resemble gun control. There is a law against owning a dangerous dog. One who nevertheless owns a dangerous dog must keep it tied in metal chains at all times. Even if the dog is defanged or trained not to harm people, it must be chained because it may frighten strangers, and as a result may cause stressrelated injuries such as miscarriage and heart attacks. One of the more pious rabbis, Rabbi Pinchas Ben Yair, was so stringent about this leash law that he refused to own mules, because they can occasionally cause injury. These sources teach us that halakhah would require any gun to be carefully locked at all times, with allowances made in cases where the gun is actively being used for security, of course. Those who are more stringent in their rulings would avoid guns completely. There is a second halakhah relevant to this issue. The Talmud prohibits anyone from selling offensive weapons to idol worshippers and suspected criminals. The rule against selling to idol worshippers is based on an assumption that the idol worshippers will use the weapons against Jews. It is likewise prohibited to sell such weapons to anyone suspected of reselling them to criminals. This halakhah requires that the buyers of firearms be carefully screened, and resembles in many ways laws requiring a registry of gun and rifle owners. Recognizing that a gun is an inherently dangerous object, we can conclude that halakhah (like many current gun control laws) would require owners and vendors of guns to take all possible precautions to prevent their guns from causing any harm. Now I realize that just having a discussion here this morning concerning Jewish law on gun control does not make us any safer. Despite the claims of anti-semites, Jews do not actually control the media or the government. We are a tiny minority in America. We can argue about gun control with our neighbors, and even do so from a religious perspective. That alone won t change any laws or reduce our risk of being killed or wounded by a shooting. So that begs us to ask the question: are there any practical steps that we ourselves can take to help protect our society against gun violence? You know I wouldn t ask that question unless I had some answers. Page 3 of 6

4 We are not only Jews. We are also citizens and we are voters. This November it s likely our votes probably won t make very much difference in the presidential election. It is widely believed that Massachusetts is a safe state for President Obama. Under our electoral college system, if President Obama wins in Massachusetts, all of the electoral votes will go to him. Neither candidate is therefore spending much time soliciting our votes. In any case, it also appears that neither candidate is likely even to advocate any changes in the law regarding gun control, much less work hard to accomplish those changes. President Obama said on Wednesday in a speech to the Urban League that he believes that even gun owners would agree "that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals. That AK-47 s belong the battlefield, not on the streets of our cities." He referred to background checks to prevent criminals and fugitives from purchasing weapons, and preventing guns from getting into the hands of the mentally unbalanced. But the President has not offered any specific proposals and has not spoken of any timetable or process for action. And by the way: an AK-47 is an automatic weapon that has been banned for civilian use since Holmes fired a semiautomatic weapon, the AR-15 Governor Romney also spoke on the topic this week. He gave an interview in which he was asked about the access that Holmes had to an assault weapon and thousands of rounds of ammunition. This is Governor Romney s response: Well this person shouldn t have had any kind of weapons and bombs and other devices and it was illegal for him to have many of those things already. But he had them. And so we can sometimes hope that just changing the law will make all bad things go away. It won t. Changing the heart of the American people may well be what s essential. So really neither of the presidential candidates has said anything that would cause us to expect leadership from either of them on this issue. There is another election here in November, however, an election that could have more relevance: the race between Senator Scott Brown and Professor Elizabeth Warren. We have not heard a lot from them on this issue either, but we do know that their views differ on one important subject: whether to ban assault weapons. In 1994, the Congress enacted a national ban on assault weapons. The semiautomatic rifle used by James Holmes was an assault weapon. Such weapons have no purpose other than to shoot as many bullets as possible in the shortest possible time, a use that has the devastating effect we saw in Aurora. Page 4 of 6

5 The ban enacted in 1994 unfortunately included a sunset clause. This meant that the law would expire in ten years unless Congress renewed it. When Congress failed to act in 2004, the law expired. Assault weapons became lawful once more. Except in Massachusetts. Here, we passed our own state law that also bans assault weapons. Fortunately, that is still in force. So how do Senator Brown and Professor Warren differ on this issue? They both say that they support the ban in state law here. Senator Brown, however, maintains that this is a subject that should be left to each state to decide. So he does not favor the restoration of the national ban. Professor Warren disagrees. She wants to see the national ban reinstated. This is only one of the many issues on which these candidates disagree. Each voter will need to decide which issues seem most important in selecting our next Senator from Massachusetts. On the issue of gun control, though, it is clear that we do have a choice. Professor Warren would vote to ban assault weapons nationally. Senator Brown would oppose such a ban. There is one other goal we can pursue to help reduce the criminal use of guns. This is a technology called micro-stamping. It was developed with the goal of aiding in ballistics identification. Micro-stamping involves the use of laser technology to engrave a microscopic marking inside the gun. When the gun is fired, these etchings are transferred to the cartridge case and remain imprinted on the spent cartridges. The police can recover those cartridges. Ballistics experts can examine them. This tool allows law enforcement authorities to obtain information they can use to trace the firearm and have a better chance of solving crimes involving a gun. Bills to require micro-stamping have been introduced into both the Congress and the Massachusetts legislature. They have not yet been enacted. Getting them enacted into law should be a priority for us. I ve mentioned two specific laws we could support: a federal ban on assault weapons, and a law that would require micro-stamping on all guns. Our third task is to wake up to the terrifying facts about gun violence and pledge ourselves to do whatever we can to reduce this deadly plague in America. Consider just three of the grim facts about the harm caused by guns: Each and every year, guns kill or wound an average of almost 100,000 people in America. That s 275 people every single day. Guns have killed more than one million people in this country since Page 5 of 6

6 Among 23 populous, high-income countries, 80% of all firearm deaths occur in the United States. Jewish law requires that we protect society from wild dogs, from dangerous conditions in our homes and in the public ways, and in general from all sources of obvious potential harm. Guns would have been the first concern of the rabbis who made these rules if guns had existed in the time of the Talmud. It s up to us now to do all we can to reduce gun violence. And let us say, Amen. Page 6 of 6