Image by Getty Images

Writer-at-Large Jane Eisner October 3, 2017

Just four months ago, Forward editor-in-chief Jane Eisner penned this plea for action against gun violence. Her words seem all the more prescient now that another deadly shooting has erupted — this time at a high school in the heart of south Florida’s Jewish community.

As is its custom, the National Rifle Association has gone silent since a gunman massacred 59 people and injured hundreds more in Las Vegas on Sunday. No tweets, no Facebook posts, no press releases, no interviews.

The gun rights lobby has a lot of practice with this public relations technique. After Orlando, and Newtown, and all the other recent mass shootings that are getting too numerous to list, the NRA lays low, waits for the bodies to be buried and the anguished cries to subside, and then goes about its business funding and strong-arming American lawmakers to ensure that we guard our guns much more vigilantly than we protect our children.

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

But just because the NRA is silent, we don’t have to be. Those lawmakers should be ashamed of themselves, and we need to make sure they feel that shame.

According to The Washington Post, since 1998 the NRA has donated nearly $4 million to members of Congress, almost all of them Republicans, almost all of them men.

Two are Jewish: U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, tops the New York delegation, receiving $14,850, and the Long Island Republican has only been in Congress since 2015. His NRA approval rating is 93%. The NRA political victory fund gave him an A. And the New York Shooters Committee on Political Education saw fit to rate him at 100%.

The other is Rep. David Kustoff, also a Republican, of Tennessee, who received $2,000 in this, his first year in Congress. So far, the NRA gave him an 86% rating.

(Sen. Bernie Sanders, an erstwhile Democrat, did receive generous support from the NRA many years ago, but not recently. His NRA ratings have trended downward over the years, to 14% in 2012.)

Image by Getty Images

For a well-funded organization like the NRA, $4 million isn’t much. And it’s not. But those donations and those ratings are potent signals to its membership to bundle and bestow their own generous contributions. Plus, the lobby funds party committees on the national, state and local level, and has its own SuperPAC.

This powerful apparatus is the central reason that Congress continually defies the will of the electorate — Democratic and Republican — who favor sensible gun control laws. It’s the reason the government is not allowed to even consider the proliferation of guns as a public health epidemic. It’s the reason home-grown terror by white men with far too many guns is more lethal than the Muslim terrorism President Trump brandishes to stoke fear and cause distraction.

Don’t be distracted. My calls and emails to Zeldin’s and Kustoff’s congressional offices were not returned as of this writing. Contact them yourself. Let them know that they should be ashamed of accepting even a dime of this bloodied money.

The Occidental Observer, a “white identity” website, last year ran an article headlined “Jews and Jewish organizations lead the gun control campaign.” Damn right. Let’s lead.

Contact Jane Eisner at [email protected] or on Twitter, @Jane_Eisner.

Shira Feder contributed reporting.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

$90 → $180 $180 → $360

$360 → $720

Other amount