On Tuesday night, I, along with hundreds of other students and Gainesville residents, had the distinct privilege to hear Elie Wiesel, writer, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor, speak at UF.
He ambled onto the stage and delivered a beautiful speech about the power of knowledge and the sin of wasting it. He talked about speaking to the Dalai Lama and meeting Oprah. During the Q-and-A session that followed his speech, he listened patiently as quivering, awestruck students asked questions about survival, the existence of God and his opinions about current global issues.
The questions, on the whole, were interesting and thought-provoking, except one.
A man on the mezzanine level of the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts approached the microphone and asked for Wiesel to weigh in on the debate about the Second Amendment in the United States.
Wiesel said that if a person needs a license to drive a car, then he or she needs a license to buy a gun.
The same man asked a follow-up question, something to this effect: Did Wiesel believe the events of the Holocaust would have been different if Germany had had an equivalent to the Second Amendment?
A murmur went through the audience, and people craned in their seats to see who would ask Wiesel, a prominent advocate against violence, a calculated question about gun control?
Wiesel, of course, answered with aplomb. He said, in his extended answer, that he doesn’t believe in “ifs.”
The historical-speculation argument for gun control isn’t new, but as Alex Seitz-Wald, political reporter for Salon, wrote in his piece “The Hitler gun control lie,” “The ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.”
“Does the fact that Nazis forced Jews into horrendous ghettos indict urban planning?” Seitz-Wald wrote. “Should we eliminate all police officers because the Nazis used police officers to oppress and kill the Jews? What about public works — Hitler loved public works projects? Of course not. These are merely implements that can be used for good or evil, as much as gun advocates like to argue about guns themselves. If guns don’t kill people, then neither does gun control cause genocide (genocidal regimes cause genocide).”
And while Wiesel was correct in his assertion that big “ifs” such as this are meaningless, I don’t believe the question he was presented came from a place of good intentions or a desire for the intelligent answer that Wiesel provided.
I believe the man in the audience was looking for a specific answer: He had an agenda.
One of the problems with the current gun-control debate is the pro-gun inclination for unfounded logic for more relaxed gun laws.
Arming teachers will not stop school shootings, pressuring women to carry guns at all times will not lower rape statistics and, unfortunately, guns would not have prevented a Holocaust during World War II.
In his article, Seitz-Wald interviewed Brown University Historian Omer Bartov, who said, “Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”
The question of speculation at a serious discussion about philosophy and survival at a lecture given by a man who has devoted his life to what the Norwegian Nobel Committee called “practical work in the cause of peace” is simply a waste of time.
Chloe Finch is a journalism sophomore at UF. Her columns run on Thursdays. You can contact her via opinions@alligator.org.
