The God-given right to Bear Arms?

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Alan Fud

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This has been addressed VERY successfully from a Christian perspective (Luke 22:36-38, etc.), but I never seen it addressed from a Jewish perspective. Specifically, can somebody give me a rebuttal to the following comment ...

I must have missed the bit in the Torah that said about having a Uzi collection.

... Thanks in advance. I believe that I may have a good chance of making a convert out of this individual with the proper eye-opening reply.
 
All you have to do is find references to bearing arms in the old testament.

1 Samuel 29:5
Isn't this the David they sang about in their dances: "'Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands'?"

And wasn't David a man after God's own heart?
Acts 13:19 (referencing 1 Samuel 13:13-14)

TR's jpfo link has some good stuff too.
 
A lot of people hold religion as their number one priority. The laws of god are above those of man. I'm not one of those people, but I do respect their right to believe as such.
 
Specifically, can somebody give me a rebuttal to the following comment ...
I must have missed the bit in the Torah that said about having a Uzi collection.

"That's okay, more left for me,"?
 
If not GOD given,then where does it come from? The U.S.Constitution, including the Bill of Rights ,recognizes these rights as pre-existing and only guarantees that government cannot remove rights and does not grant them.
 
No god grants rights, no god protects rights, no god gives anything.

People honor rights. The written law states which rights are not to be violated by a body of government. People protect the laws. People protect the rights of people.
 
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.-- perhap you read this in a history book
 
"People protect the rights of people." So..if a majority of "the people" decide that there is no individual right to keep and bear arms,then what protection do we have?
 
Could creator be used in a general sense? You do recall a number of the founders were non-Christian?

Yes, that is why we must protect the rights we have so they are not taken away. If no one protects rights, we don't have them now do we?
 
It's more than simply granted by fellow men. The idea is that the right to protect one's self is inherent in natural law. Whether that law arises from a creator or nature is not really the significant point. The significant point is the principle does NOT arise from Parliament or a King. It's inherent regardless of the written law.
 
freakshow10mm said:
There were atheists among the founders.
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Not really, atheists were pretty rare back then. Some of them were deists, however.

I'm an atheist myself, and I think of them as "natural rights".
 
True but the 56 men who signed this document weren't among them. "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them..."
 
True but the 56 men who signed this document weren't among them. "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them..."
Click to expand...
Sounds like a typically deist quote to me....
 
Some of us need to work on our reading comprehension skills. A few of you have quoted the U.S. Constitution, which, while it is viewed by many to incorporate natural law, is not a very good source for information on the tenets of the Jewish religion. Actually, I think TexasRifleman cited a pretty good source.

TexasRifleman said:
Plenty of info here:

Jews and Gun Control

In particular this page here seems to be what you are after:

http://www.jpfo.org/filegen-n-z/yaffe1.htm
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In taking a look at what TexasRifleman linked to, it seems that this is a fairly good summary of the support in Judaism for the right to bear arms in self-defense:

In Exodus we read (Chapter 22:1): 'If, while breaking in, the thief is discovered, and he is struck and dies, [it is as if] he has no blood.' Rashi, the greatest commentator on the Tanach (the original, Jewish name for the 24 books of the Bible) who gathers together millennia of interpretation, comments: “He has no blood. [This signifies that] this is not [considered] murder. It is as though he [the thief] was [considered] dead from the start. Here the Torah teaches you [the lesson]: If someone comes to kill you, kill him first. And this one [the thief] has come to kill you, because he knows that no one [can] hold himself back and remain silent when he sees people taking his money. Therefore, he [the thief] has come with the acknowledgement that if the owner of the property were to stand up against him, he [the owner] would kill him [the thief]. - [From Talmud Sanhedrin. 72a]”. As you can see we are obliged to defend ourselves - “If someone comes to kill you, kill him first”.

I'm not Jewish, but it seems to me to be pretty self-evident that most Jews feel strongly that the lessons of history dictate that they should be prepared to defend themselves, individually and collectively.
 
Actually I quoted the Declaration of Independence not the Constitution. As to Jewish thinking on self defence,read the book of Nehemiah concerning the rebuilding of the city wall.
 
Why is it that the militant athiests are so quick to attack religion every chance they get?

It seems to me that the OP asked a legitimate question that is best addressed by someone with knowledge of Jewish law, not someone who bashes religion every chance they get.

Freakshow, I don't push my religious views here because it's not the place and folks like you would have a fit, yet your views are known far and wide.

I believe it would be more respectful to let someone with specific knowledge of the OP's issue answer his question.
 
the bible says throughout many verses that people have a right to defend themselves, their families, and their livelihood from people that wish to do those stated harm.(generally, these are not quoted because i'm to lazy to get my bible) at one time that protection was with spears and bows and swords. now, we prefer to do it with more sophisticated weapons such as guns and finely tuned knives (because as your enemies and killers and rapists get more brutal and use more advanced weaponry such as, a pistol or any other gun) which makes for a much less brutal defense, but still very effective. so, techinically the bible does state that yes, we have a right to defend ourselves and our families, in any means possible that it would take to do so.
so that's my 2 cents

i am not jewish
i am a Christian Nazarene
 
Should anyone need justification by any books but the ones in history class?
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Religion, and many "books" related thereto, are part of history. So.....

Regardless...Society these days, as a whole it would seem, tends to balk at "God mandated" rules vs. going its own way and basically interpreting things to fit current needs/trends. So, best to look at political avenues for most (if not all) rights vs. basing any on religion. Sad but true.
 
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