“We can either live in a paranoid politically correct world frantically trying not to offend the Hitlers and Mohammeds, and blaming their victims when they kill, or we can be free men and women who have chosen to take the power to defend our rights into our own hands.
While a thousand organizations use the Holocaust as a platform for speeches about tolerance, Children Of Jewish Holocaust Survivors [Jews Can Shoot] is conducting firearms training… Freedom is not defended with empty idealism easily perverted into appeasement of evil, but with the force of arms.”
All too many of the other great tragedies of history - Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few - were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece... If a few hundred Jewish fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.
Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Silveira v. Lockyer, 2003
Habah l'hargecha hashkem l'hargo -- "If someone is coming to kill you, rise against him and kill him first."
Jews Can Shoot: Learning from History, Protecting the Future
Jews Can Shoot understands the deadly outcome of gun control: the loss of self-defense and, far too often, the rise of repressive governments.
The story of our founder, Doris Wise, begins with her parents—both survivors of the Holocaust who met in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. They married, moved to Toronto, and eventually settled in the United States, where they proudly became American citizens. Their survival taught Doris a lesson she has carried all her life: safety can never be taken for granted.
“It is so much easier to talk about the lessons learned from the past than to implement them in the present and the future. But we, the Jewish people, cannot ignore the lessons learned from the Holocaust, as they apply to the present day.” — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
Inspired by this truth, Doris founded Jews Can Shoot in 2013—an organization devoted to education and advocacy on gun laws, gun rights, and the cultural and political forces that echo the dangerous conditions preceding the Holocaust.For Doris, Jews Can Shoot is more than advocacy. It is a moral imperative: “It is the best way I have found to honor my parents and all the survivors, as well as the millions of victims who perished.”
