mordechaianiliewicz
Member
Okay, I want your impressions. This is an essay I had to write for my Lit. & Comp class. It's supposed to be a narrative of a life-changing event. I couldn't come up with anything that I really wanted my teacher to know.... except for this. Tell me what you think.
How I Became Armed
I am pro-gun, but I wasn’t always pro-gun. I’m not who you’d normally think of when you think “gun owner,” being a suburban, bi-racial college student. That being said, I am a member of the NRA, and shoot about once a month.
It all started when I was 13 years old. I had been studying history since I could read. At this point, I’d discovered World War II, and had also discovered the Holocaust. I’d read about the death camps, the furnaces, and Nazi racial ideology. I read about the evil that swept across Europe, and wondered how a civilization as advanced as Germany had been drawn to the evil ideas of Hitler.
A much more important question to me was how six million people were killed by so few. The Einsatzgruppen, the unit of the SS tasked with killing the Jews (and later with herding them to the death camps), never numbered more than fifty thousand in number, and that is a very, very high figure. How did fifty thousand kill six million?
History books handled logistics, and dates, but not how the Holocaust was done. I stumbled across the answer by finding the Nazi Weapon’s Law of 1934. The already minimally armed Jews of Germany were prohibited from acquiring guns. This law made the wholesale murder of six million Jews, Gypsies, and other “undesirables” possible in a very short time by an industrialized nation.
At 13, I was changed. I thought about the sheer number; the massive scale. The power of an industrial giant using scientific means to kill millions of it’s own people. And the reason why was vastly more simple than anyone had said in my studies. They were unarmed.
However, it wasn’t just them, over the next few weeks, I read about Russia, and China; about Turkey, and Cambodia. In each case, a population without weapons (or with them) was disarmed, and prohibited from getting weaponry. Then, a wholesale slaughter began. All in total one hundred million human beings have been killed by governments in the 20th century alone.
I imagined myself at the edge of a mass grave, a soldier standing above my emaciated body. He readied a pistol to kill me. I lived the experience in my mind, and it haunted me, more than anything else ever has. This event happened countless times throughout the 20th century. Who knows how many times some version of it occurred before that?
I immediately began to read all I could about guns, their history, their mechanical function, their use. It became an obsession, one that was very irritating to my parents, lifelong pacifists. But, despite their objections, within the year, I fired a gun for the first time with my late Grandfather. He showed me how to shoot his rifles and his old Smith & Wesson revolver. For the first time, I felt the power and responsibility of being armed. It was an amazing feeling that I will keep with me for the rest of my life, and one of my proudest moments, only to be eclipsed by one later at 18. It was then that I bought my first gun and joined the estimated eighty million Americans that own one or more guns.
I think back to that moment, caught in the pages of books, obsessed with a question I had no answer for. I’ve often thought of all the people who have died because they didn’t have the means to protect themselves; people who died because those with power unleashed a plan to violate their most basic right as humans, the right to life, by first taking away the means to defend it.
My ownership of guns is a tribute to those untold, and largely unknown millions. Every shot I take is a promise. In this nation, the only one which has written it’s acknowledgement to the right to self-defense into it’s constitution, I will always be armed. I will never be disarmed, and the phrase “from my cold dead hands” isn’t just a catchphrase, it’s a way of life. I will pass this legacy on to my children when they come. It all began with the victims. They didn’t die in vain.
(It's actually double spaced, and all the other things that they want for a college paper, but I had to put it this way for it to work here)
How I Became Armed
I am pro-gun, but I wasn’t always pro-gun. I’m not who you’d normally think of when you think “gun owner,” being a suburban, bi-racial college student. That being said, I am a member of the NRA, and shoot about once a month.
It all started when I was 13 years old. I had been studying history since I could read. At this point, I’d discovered World War II, and had also discovered the Holocaust. I’d read about the death camps, the furnaces, and Nazi racial ideology. I read about the evil that swept across Europe, and wondered how a civilization as advanced as Germany had been drawn to the evil ideas of Hitler.
A much more important question to me was how six million people were killed by so few. The Einsatzgruppen, the unit of the SS tasked with killing the Jews (and later with herding them to the death camps), never numbered more than fifty thousand in number, and that is a very, very high figure. How did fifty thousand kill six million?
History books handled logistics, and dates, but not how the Holocaust was done. I stumbled across the answer by finding the Nazi Weapon’s Law of 1934. The already minimally armed Jews of Germany were prohibited from acquiring guns. This law made the wholesale murder of six million Jews, Gypsies, and other “undesirables” possible in a very short time by an industrialized nation.
At 13, I was changed. I thought about the sheer number; the massive scale. The power of an industrial giant using scientific means to kill millions of it’s own people. And the reason why was vastly more simple than anyone had said in my studies. They were unarmed.
However, it wasn’t just them, over the next few weeks, I read about Russia, and China; about Turkey, and Cambodia. In each case, a population without weapons (or with them) was disarmed, and prohibited from getting weaponry. Then, a wholesale slaughter began. All in total one hundred million human beings have been killed by governments in the 20th century alone.
I imagined myself at the edge of a mass grave, a soldier standing above my emaciated body. He readied a pistol to kill me. I lived the experience in my mind, and it haunted me, more than anything else ever has. This event happened countless times throughout the 20th century. Who knows how many times some version of it occurred before that?
I immediately began to read all I could about guns, their history, their mechanical function, their use. It became an obsession, one that was very irritating to my parents, lifelong pacifists. But, despite their objections, within the year, I fired a gun for the first time with my late Grandfather. He showed me how to shoot his rifles and his old Smith & Wesson revolver. For the first time, I felt the power and responsibility of being armed. It was an amazing feeling that I will keep with me for the rest of my life, and one of my proudest moments, only to be eclipsed by one later at 18. It was then that I bought my first gun and joined the estimated eighty million Americans that own one or more guns.
I think back to that moment, caught in the pages of books, obsessed with a question I had no answer for. I’ve often thought of all the people who have died because they didn’t have the means to protect themselves; people who died because those with power unleashed a plan to violate their most basic right as humans, the right to life, by first taking away the means to defend it.
My ownership of guns is a tribute to those untold, and largely unknown millions. Every shot I take is a promise. In this nation, the only one which has written it’s acknowledgement to the right to self-defense into it’s constitution, I will always be armed. I will never be disarmed, and the phrase “from my cold dead hands” isn’t just a catchphrase, it’s a way of life. I will pass this legacy on to my children when they come. It all began with the victims. They didn’t die in vain.
(It's actually double spaced, and all the other things that they want for a college paper, but I had to put it this way for it to work here)
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On something like this, though, short is probably the order of the day.]