I've been hired by a Korean scientist to sit across from him in the Max Planck Institute cafeteria twice a week for two hours at a time and talk to him.
I know. It sounds weird. Like friendship prostitution or something. But he'll likely be moving with his family to the United States in a few months and he wants to practice his English with a native speaker before he lands on American dirt. He wants me to listen to him and correct his mistakes and talk to him about American life and culture. But the most important thing is that we just talk so he can practice.
We met for the first time on Tuesday and talked about everything from the presidential election to his kids. Near the end of the two hours, I started scrambling a bit for material and brought up
last week's shooting at Northern Illinois University. He told me, yes, he'd heard about that, and that he had a question for me regarding this.
"Why," he said, "can people have guns?"
He's not the only person thinking this. Most of Asia and all of Europe share his sentiment. Why on earth would a civilized country allow its ordinary citizens to walk around wielding weapons of death? Are they not bothered by the idea that the creepy person at the convenience store checkout can legally have a pistol in their back pocket?
It's a fair question.
I, personally, am not a big gun person. My immediate family members are not hunters. I didn't really grow up with guns the way many of my Idaho classmates did. But I have handled them. I've shot a .22 before and a 12-gauge on several occasions (and woken up the next morning with a bruised shoulder as proof of my poor form). I enjoy it. It's fun shattering clay pigeons and hitting targets. And I'm going to be totally honest with you. Popping the smoking spent shell out of a shotgun makes me feel like a total
badass.
Me and a gunBut it also scares the
bejeebies out of me.
I get the shakes a little bit every time I touch a gun. What if my finger slips? What if something distracts me? Or (the worst question of all) what if I just have one, tiny split-second lapse of judgment? Then what?
And so I've always been a little non-committal when it comes to the Great Second Amendment Debate. But I decided, for these purposes, I would start with the basics.
I explained to the Korean scientist what the Second Amendment is and who put it there. He'd never heard of the Second Amendment. I explained the word "militia" and I told him that the men who drafted the Bill of Rights felt that it was crucial that the American people be able to organize themselves into a citizen army and take up arms against their government in the event of irreversible corruption at its highest levels.
As I was speaking, I recalled an account I'd read recently about Dresden under Nazi rule that occurred relatively early on in the Nazi party's rise to ... whatever it was they eventually rose to.
On Nov. 9, 1938, the Nazis hosted a nationwide shindig that would be known later as
the Night of Broken Glass. Basically, they marched into every Jewish-owned business in the country and smashed everything in them.
At this time, Dresden had a pretty small Jewish population, but despite this, was home to Germany's largest and, by many accounts, most beautiful
synagogue. Most
Dresdners, including those who prescribed to the Nazi party's anti-Semitic sentiments, loved this building. It added interest to the cultured city's gorgeous skyline and
Dresdners have always felt that aesthetic is important.
Not surprisingly, the Nazis did not carry the same soft spot for Dresden's synagogue, and on the Night of Broken Glass, they doused the building in gasoline and torched it. Dresden's fire brigade rushed to the scene in full force, including a fire boat on the nearby Elbe River, to try to save what it could of the beloved building. But the Nazi soldiers blocked them and forbade them from extinguishing the fire. The fire trucks and fire boat sat unused as the residents helplessly watched the synagogue burn. Occasionally an onlooker would voice disapproval of the situation and be hauled away by SS thugs.
The story is indicative, I think, of most German citizens' relationship with the Nazi party. People wonder how something so evil could ever rise to power, but the citizens were completely helpless against it. They had their hands tied behind their back and a
luger pointed at their collective head.
And I thought, as I explained to the Korean scientist the meaning of "militia", how things might have been different if the citizens of Germany in the 1930s had had access to guns.
It's possible, I thought to myself, that World War II could have been prevented.
And I realized at that moment that I believe, rather vehemently, in the Second Amendment.
It feels kind of weird.
JEM
