Silence Is a Choice

On Legacy

One bullet to the head killed my grandfather and another bullet took the murderer’s own life. Guy Pearce killed Norman Mueller in cold blood in a workplace shooting one day in 1939. My mother was six years old; her older sister Jean was nine. Their mother, Edith, not much more than 30 and in the manner of people in those days, she mourned and went to work. My grandmother got a job in the middle of the Depression with Europe at war, America still on the sidelines of that cataclysmic conflagration against fascism and authoritarianism, and two young girls of her own to raise.

She barely ever dated — my mom once shared that she and her sister had mischievous incantations they uttered to scuttle any potential suitors — and she never remarried. She stayed married to her Norman for the rest of her life, until she died just shy of 100. Grandma said that each year when her cactus bloomed — on her birthday, on Norman’s birthday, on their wedding anniversary — it was her beloved saying hello from above. Harry and Bess Houdini never pulled that one off.

I was born when my mother was 30 and the home I was raised in was a loving home that Grandma visited often and of course we visited hers as well. There was a stillness to her home. Impeccably kept. Well through the 70s and 80s, her “icebox” and gas stove were like firmly planted oaks, a testimony to the home she and Norman intended to build. Her kitchen table, looking out upon a backyard busy with birds in well-tended feeders, was a place of solitude, meditation. A kind of living memorial. Like a player in Our Town staged in her corner of westside Milwaukee, I used to imagine the grandfather I never knew playing cards with us next to Grandma, telling stories, looking with affection at his family, bathing the room with the light of his gentle soul.

According to the newspaper account of the murder, Guy Pearce, who was mentally ill on on leave from work, had returned that day in 1939, looking to get his job back. My grandfather was the first man he met. The Milwaukee Sentinel reported witnesses saying that Norman Mueller’s last words were, “How can I help you, Guy?”

And then he was killed.

“How can I help you, Guy?” became the kind of saintly calling card of my late grandfather’s essence. My grandmother revered him, cherished his memory, and said to me, as she lay dying, “I’m going to see my Norman soon.” She believed that her entire life.

My mother remained, to some degree, deeply traumatized by her father’s murder her entire life until she died of cancer at 79. She raised us in a peaceful home, to be sure. No toy guns were allowed. She wore a politics of compassion on her sleeve. After she and my dad split, she went back to work, too. A divorced woman in the mid-70s without a college degree, she worked in Milwaukee’s Black neighborhoods doing admin for community development organizations and volunteering for city, state and national political campaigns. As I look back, her favorite candidates were either common-sense, peace loving men of Middle America (George McGovern, Frank Harris, Mo Udall) or wise-cracking Jewish guys, clever, liberal and very smart, and kind.

I have memories of her on many occasions standing at the kitchen sink after dinner and staring out into our backyard, dishtowel over her shoulder, music playing on the radio (Roberta Flack, Kenny Rogers) and tears falling down her cheeks. I’d approach her with a hug and ask her what’s wrong.

“I’m thinking about my father,” she’d say. These painful memories, intermittent but persistent, were her blooming cactus. More thorn than flower to be sure.

But she did plant, prolifically. She tended garden as well as anyone. She knit, cross-stitched, wove, and sewed. She made many sets of clothes for my sisters and in second grade, even sent me to school with matching shirt and pants and an ascot around my neck. (Don’t ask. Please.) In the last ten years of her life, while battling breast cancer, she volunteered every week at Gilda’s Club, teaching other cancer patients how to weave baskets from twigs and branches. She “never ate the bread of the idle.”

Mom was a poll worker at every election I can ever remember, even up until the month before she died in 2012, when she was hoping Wisconsin voters would recall then Governor Scott Walker.

My politics ended up being very similar to hers. As a legacy issue for my mother and grandparents, I support organizations and political candidates that advocate for gun safety. As the son of parents who witnessed and served their country in the Second World War, I was taught that democracy is precious, fragile, and must always be protected. After she died, I even became a monthly donor to Milwaukee’s Hunger Task Force, a local agency dear to her.

It wasn’t until I met Representative Lucy McBath, a fearless gun safety advocate serving Georgia’s Sixth Congressional district, who was traversing the country in memory of her son Jordan, killed senselessly with a gun in 2012, that I learned I was technically a “survivor” of gun violence as well. I told her my mother’s story and she said, “Well, Rabbi, you’re a survivor, too.”

Trauma is an inheritance. How it lands in us, shapes us, and what we do with it is our own legacy to pass on to those we bring into the world. When one of my own daughters, as a high school freshman, helped organize and lead a walk-out of New York City students after one-too-many (one-too-many, one-too-many, one-too-many) school shootings, I left work to go support her protest, megaphone in hand, in Washington Square Park. My mom was long gone by then. Like me, she never met Norman Mueller. But something landed in and shaped her. And with her own hands and heart and prodigious voice, she was doing something about it too.

***

Charlie Kirk’s wife Erika and their two children are now survivors as well of gun violence since Tyler Robinson murdered him on September 10, 2025. The trauma, the loss, the unbearable grief, is now theirs to bear. None of us can know what it is to hold that until we have been there ourselves. To recognize this is essential to what every human ought to strive for in pursuit of the most subtle and necessary of human traits — empathy.

Without empathy, we lonely humans are unmoored. In my own Jewish tradition, the texts that we bind us abound.

“Love thy neighbor as thyself.” (Leviticus 19:18)

“Do not separate yourself from the community, Do not trust in yourself until the day of your death, Do not judge your fellow man until you have reached his place. (Pirke Avot 2:4)

“Do not wrong the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:20)

Easy to say. Harder to do when our own hearts are broken and in pain. But do we must.

Charlie Kirk wasn’t the only American to die by gun violence on September 10. According to the National Gun Violence Memorial, so too were: Carlos Bogan, 34, Mobile, AL; Cedell Miller, 27, Hialeah, FL; Dedric Arnold, 23, Cedar Rapids, IA; John Michael Lee, 48, Canton, OH; Joseph Bojoquez, Jr, 22, San Diego, CA; Keith Deion Golson, 38, Sacramento, CA; Kenneth Adams, Jr, 61, Louisville, KY; Marlon Lane, 18, Jacksonville, FL; Miguel Ethan Soto Trader, 25, Wallops Island, VA; Tiara Bellizaire-Young, 25 and Octavis Myers, Pembroke Pines, FL; Randon Howard, 30, Marlton, MD; Rondaldo Richmond, 49, Stone Mountain, GA; Shannon Rodriguez, 60, Dallas, TX; Ty Haskell Jenkins, IV, 20, Burton, SC; Zayone Burman, 24, Baltimore, MD.

They all shared so much: Each came into the world through their mothers. Each began life with unlimited potential. Each death at the end of a gun. They all came from so-called Red States and Blue States. In 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, published a map of gun violence in the United States that provides a very helpful, and disturbing, visual index of this cancer. It doesn’t take a magnifying glass to realize that the stronger the gun safety laws in each state, the less violence there is.

The numbers are shocking by any measure. According the NPR, individual murders, mass shootings, and political violence continue to rise dramatically. Gun violence remains a scourge across America, persistently on record as one of the most violent nations in the world with more than 380 million guns in circulation (120 per 100 Americans) according to the Trace.

Domestic violence —whether intentional or accidental; drug related violence; hunting accidents; and yes, political violence. Each are possible and each are exacerbated by one thing: Easy access to guns, made possible and especially since the Scalia 2008 D.C. v Heller opinion: a reading of the Second Amendment as a fundamentally individual right, not the purview of a “well-regulated militia,” as the actual amendment states.

In the case of political violence (especially that which results in death) we might fairly ask when is the right time to analyze and question the essential facts and assumptions related to the most recent attacks on individuals: the fatal shooting of Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband; the D.C. killing of the young Jewish diplomats Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky; the Molotov cocktail attack on the residence of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro; the attempted assassination of President Trump; the skull-fracturing by hammer of Paul Pelosi, husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi; the conspiracy to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

Each highly charged examples of a dangerously combustible political violence. Shifting our focus and creating context for talking about political violence in America in general, as a real historical phenomenon, it is not only fair but necessary to mention the assassinations of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy.

In addition, given America’s ongoing divided legacy of slavery and its after effects on Black Americans, it is not only fair but necessary to mention the assassinations of Megar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. And on the heels of King’s death in April 1968, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy that June. There were two assassination attempts on President Ford and one assassination attempt on President Reagan. It stands to reason that anyone who has served in the White House does so knowing that their lives are entrusted to law enforcement and the Secret Service to protect them and their families.

The right of Americans to talk about all of this in its painful but necessary complexity is, like the 2nd Amendment, also a Constitutionally guaranteed expression of Free Speech. To remind you of what the 1st Amendment says: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

What is different today, under the authoritarian expressions of the Trump presidency, is the odious and anti-democratic measures being taken to silence celebrities, journalists, teachers and regular citizens whose language may be no better or no worse than much of the other sewage that proliferates on social media. It’s just that for Trump and his followers, criticism is a one way street. Unfortunately, it’s a one way street that leads to a silencing of public discourse, a crushing of political dissent, and a weakening, if not a dangerously diminishing assault on American democratic republican norms. In this regard, Trump has shown his hand: He and his administration are more like Putin and Xi then anyone who has ever been sworn to office to the defend the Constitution of the United States.

To wake up in America every day is to wake up to a shameful legacy of violence and gun death. We who consider ourselves patriotic Americans must mourn together: the children cut down in their neighborhoods; the young man or woman gone astray on the poverty to prison pipeline; the untreated mentally ill, like Guy Pearce who killed a grandfather I never knew; and Charlie Kirk, who flew close to the fire in our enflamed political landscape and paid with his life.

Every life is inherently sacred. Every death is unique.

Our hearts and minds must be open enough and generous enough to bear the weight of pondering the meaning of this moment.

Some talk too much; some talk too soon. Some don’t say enough. Others say nothing at all.

But those who silence by force are never on the side of victory. In a fragile democracy such as ours, silence must always be a choice, not a muzzle.

I learned this from my mother, whose own father was cut down by a gun.