I was thrilled last Monday when I picked up The Diamondback to read Cyrus Hadadi’s column titled “Fire with fire” regarding the Virginia Tech killings and gun laws. It opened up my eyes to many parallels and connections I hadn’t yet seen. More importantly, I learned a lesson about my own heritage that I had not even considered before.
In the climax of his op-ed, Hadadi articulately states, “Jews in Nazi Germany were not allowed to keep firearms … Gun control laws prevent citizens from protecting themselves against the rising tide of angry young men determined to avenge themselves against the world. We all can see the consequences: concentration camps, gulags, Columbine and Virginia Tech.”
Before getting into the bulk of my praise for Hadadi, I’d like to point out that he is exactly right about the critical need for more students to own and carry guns. As I’ve pointed out in previous columns, I am a firm believer that the only way we can ensure our safety is to turn each and every campus in America into a John Wayne movie where everyone has a gun and only the bad guys get hurt. Kudos to Hadadi for making the observation that the problem is not that Cho Seung-Hui was able to buy his guns and ammunition so easily despite his history of mental illness but that more of his fellow students weren’t also armed. Or, in other words, only by giving stressed-out, drunk, high and, in some cases, crazy students the right to carry guns with them everywhere they go can we reduce the likelihood of another mass killing. To illustrate my point, think of the weirdest person on the campus you know. Wouldn’t you feel safer if he or she had a loaded gun in class?
But more seriously, I want to thank Hadadi for bringing our attention to the Holocaust during his op-ed about gun control. As someone of Jewish descent who has gone through the painful experience of looking back through my family tree and seeing the words “Died at Auschwitz” written under the names, I was very appreciative that Hadadi brought up the Holocaust to illustrate his point. I’m glad he had the moral clarity to see that if only the Jews had been able to somehow arm themselves everything would be different. The insinuation that the Holocaust somehow would have been mitigated had the Jews been armed is a delusional hypothetical one at best, but what better way to make a point than by bringing up a painful moment in history and twisting it with a hypothetical? I, for one, can’t think of any.
If perhaps you think that Hadadi’s comparisons could be construed as offensive to Jews, let me stop you right there. From personal experience, I can tell you that there is nothing the Jewish community looks forward to more than having each and every event that is even remotely tragic being compared in public to the annihilation of six million Jews. And I am sure that Liviu Librescu, the Holocaust survivor and professor who died in the slayings at Virginia Tech (on Holocaust Remembrance Day, no less) would take comfort in the fact that the Holocaust is being evoked in this conversation. Every morning, I like to practice comparing things to the Holocaust so that, when tragedy strikes, I’ll be ready to pounce. I like to pick a random article from the front page of the newspaper and try to compare its contents to the Holocaust in seven sentences or less. I call it “Seven Degrees of Genocide.” It’s a hoot – you really must try it. For instance, in Monday’s issue of The Diamondback, the headline was “Student struck, killed in accident.” This is an easy one – see what you can come up with.
The bottom line is that when tragedies occur, we all have an obligation to use them to push a political opinion. Moreover, if at all possible, we should try to obscure as many other tragedies as possible to make our point. Hadadi fulfilled this obligation beautifully with his column, and I’d like to thank him one more time for brightening our day with hollow and baseless rhetoric.
Tim Hiller is a junior microbiology major. He can be reached at thriller@mail.umd.edu.
