I promised all y\u2019all an update on the situation with Jews for Preservation of Firearms Ownership, now under the umbrella of the Second Amendment Foundation.\u00a0 The transfer required a three-person board of directors to be named.\u00a0 As of now, that board consists of Alan Gottlieb, Miko Tempski, and Ohad Lowy. Gottlieb is the founder of SAF, Tempski is general counsel for the same group, and Lowy is a practicing lawyer in the US who was born in Israel.<\/p>\n
Two of the three are Jewish, and I for one think that\u2019s important.\u00a0 The \u201cJ\u201d had been missing from JPFO for a while.\u00a0 Until the takeover, there hadn\u2019t been a Jewish hand at the tiller of JPFO since Charles Heller left his position as executive director a couple of years ago.\u00a0 The board that continued the mission in the interim was made up entirely of righteous Gentiles. (The capital R term Righteous Gentiles is reserved for those who worked to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. These three good men were born too late to do that.\u00a0 But they went to considerable personal expense and effort to keep the late JPFO founder Aaron Zelman\u2019s brainchild alive and on course, and that sounds pretty damn righteous to me.)<\/p>\n
I think the strongest moral imperative of JPFO grew from the lesson of the Holocaust, that gun registration led to gun confiscation and the creation of helpless victims of government-instituted genocide.\u00a0 A Second Amendment Sisters run by men, or a Pink Pistols run by straights, would simply lack credibility in its core message.\u00a0 It was important to re-solidify JPFO\u2019s Jewish identity.<\/p>\n
Non-Jews, of course, remain welcome. They have long constituted a majority of JPFO membership.\u00a0 Hell, I remember when Aaron Zelman and I used to joke about me being the token Arab member.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m happy to report that Rabbi Dovid Bendory remains with JPFO, and that the dynamic Charles Heller is back, as director of media relations for JPFO.\u00a0 Search is underway for a new executive director.<\/p>\n
The announcement of JPFO coming under the SAF umbrella was met with enthusiastic applause from the hundreds of gun owners\u2019 civil rights activists attending the Gun Rights Policy Conference in Chicago this past weekend.\u00a0 Ditto SAF\u2019s tribute to Aaron Zelman.\u00a0 Some folks had called for mass resignation from JPFO, and SAF received a flurry of nasty-grams, but as of last week only ONE actual dues-paying member had resigned and requested a refund. (I\u2019m told the dues refund was sent.)\u00a0 In fact, there has been a small spike in membership renewals and new member sign-ups.<\/p>\n
Right now, the entire gun rights community is focused on the critical mid-term elections. SAF’s sister organization, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, headquartered in Washington State, is also working overtime to fight the egregious I-594 initiative there. There are also transferred records to be sorted out, and other such mundane administrative matters. For those reasons, I don\u2019t expect the \u201cnew\u201d JPFO ball to really get rolling until after the first of next year.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve personally told the two new JPFO directors who were in attendance in Chicago that I\u2019d like to see Zelman\u2019s ground-breaking books on the desks of every Senator, Congressman, and legislative aide on Capitol Hill.\u00a0 The JPFO message needs to be more widely broadcast, and I have every reason to believe we\u2019ll see exactly that in the coming year.\u00a0 SAF is well positioned to make it happen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I promised all y\u2019all an update on the situation with Jews for Preservation of Firearms Ownership, now under the umbrella of the Second Amendment Foundation.\u00a0 The transfer required a three-person board of directors to be named.\u00a0 As of now, that board consists of Alan Gottlieb, Miko Tempski, and Ohad Lowy. Gottlieb is the founder of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4353","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-firearm-owners-civil-rights","8":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}