Y ZK

PEACE-OF-MIND

"There had been a revolution in
firearms from the early 1980s," he
said. "I learned that the gun culture
had gone sort of nuts about military-
style guns, guns designed for no other
purpose than killing people. That is
the thought that ied co the book —
the change in an industry from some-
thing that was primarily a sporting
enterprise to something focused on
guns to kill people."
Diaz's rising anger led to his current
job as an analyst with the Violence
Policy Center, one of the more mili-
tant groups in the gun debate. Today,
the group promotes regulations treat-
ing guns as a major health and safety
hazard; inevitably, they say, that could
lead to the outright banning of certain
weapons.
Diaz's passion is overwhelming --
friends talk about how he chose low-
paying anti-gun advocacy work instead
of corporate law after he left Capitol
Hill — but he comes across as low-key
and funny. Schumer, his former boss,
said that "Tom's passion and intelli-
gence are totally devoted to bringing a
rationality to our laws on guns. It's
great to have him on our side."

Pirst Causes

'

The occupational change came just
as Diaz was beginning to re-examine
his life and his place in the cosmos.
"Basically, I spent a period of about
four years where I did a lot of reading
and thinking about cosmology, about
the universe and about scientific
explanations," he said.
"Until that point I had always
described myself as an agnostic. I was
raised Protestant, but never really
accepted the Jesus myth. I was looking
for a rational, scientific approach to
life, but kept running into ultimate
dead ends."
So he began chinking about reli-
gion. "And what I found was that the
religion that seemed most consistent
with what I'd learned about the inabil-
ity of scientists to explain 'first causes'
was Judaism."
A relationship with a Jewish
woman — they have since married
was added incentive, but Diaz said it
was his own unanswered questions
that paved the way to his Orthodox
conversion.
"This is a guy who, when he takes
something on, takes it on thoroughly,
with no limits," said Rabbi Barry
Freundel, leader of Washington's
Kesher Israel congregation and the
rabbi who supervised Diaz's conver-
sion. "Thar applies both professionally

and in his Judaism; he takes his beliefs
and his commitments seriously."
The symmetry in Diaz's life seems to
please him.
Gun control and Judaism have
always gone hand in hand; Jewish
politicians, including Schumer, Sen.
Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) and Sen.
Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), are at the
forefront of the battle in Congress.
Diaz points to a number of reasons
for Jewish anti-gun sentiment, includ-
ing plain demography: Jews are heavi-
ly urban and concentrated in the
northeastern stares, while gun owner-
ship is most widespread and gun own-
ers most resistant to regulation in the
rural South and West.
But it's the culture that has grown
up around guns and the anti-gun con-
trol fight that disturbs Jews the most,
he said. "When you look at the
extremists — who now monopolize
the debate — then you're talking
about things that are foreign to Jewish
culture and dangerous to the nation as
a whole," said Diaz.
The NRA, he added, increasingly
uses radical, warlike rhetoric that
treats every skirmish as a life-or-death
struggle against Gestapo-like forces.
"I'm not saying it's time to bar the
doors, but that kind of language does
produce concerns," he said.
Some advocates of gun control real-
ly do hope to eliminate all guns, but
most have more modest goals: restric-
tions on sales to minors, background
checks and strict limits on weapons
intended to kill people.
Today's gun lobby, shaped by the
gun culture and supported by an
industry that profits from the most
lethal weapons, refuses to acknowl-
edge such distinctions, Diaz said.
And the lines between advocates of
gun-owners' rights and the promoters
of anti-government, racist and anti-
Semitic conspiracy theories that
encompass pro-gun ideology are get-
ting blurrier.
That nexus of relationships, and
not the responsible sportsman or col-
lector, is what shapes the Jewish com-
munity's strong support for firearms
regulation.
Lawmakers in Washington have a
choice, Diaz said: they can wrestle
with what he calls "doo-dad" laws,
such as those requiring trigger locks
on guns, or begin to confront head-on
a firearms industry and a gun culture
that have moved far beyond the gun-
owning mainstream.
"Without that kind of leadership,"
he warned, "we are going to see more
tragedies." ri

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Detroit Jewish News

5/28
1999

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