Reichskristallnacht was 72 years ago. Stephen Halbrook’s 2009 article in the St. Thomas Law Review details the close connection between the disarmament of the German Jews and what came next. From the conclusion:
Over a period of several weeks in October and November 1938, the Nazi government disarmed the German Jewish population. The process was carried out both by following a combination of legal forms enacted by the Weimar Republic and by sheer lawless violence. The Nazi hierarchy could now more comfortably deal with the Jewish question without fear of armed resistance by the victims.
It may be tempting to argue that the possession of firearms by the German Jews would have made no difference, either in the 1938 pogrom or later in the Holocaust, when the majority were deported and then eradicated in death camps. Yet this fatalistic view ignores that the Nazis themselves viewed armed Jews as sufficiently dangerous to their policies to place great emphasis on the need to disarm all Jews. In 1938, it was by no means certain that Jewish armed resistance movements could not develop, and even less certain that individual Jews would not use arms to resist arrest, deportation, or attacks by the Nazis.
…
Consistent adherents of a “Never Again!” policy – which assumes that what has happened in history, could again happen – would seek policies to help ensure that it does not indeed occur again.That brings us back to Alfred Flatow. [The article provides a case study of Flatow, a Jewish veteran of the German army, who competed for Germany in the 1896 Olympics.] What if he – and an unknown number of other Germans, Jews and non-Jews alike – had not registered his firearms in 1932? Or if the Weimar Republic had not decreed firearm registration at all? What if the Nazis, when they took power in 1933 and disarmed social democrats and other political enemies, or when they decided to repress the entire Jewish population in 1938, did not have police records of registered firearm owners? Can it be said with certainty that no one, either individually or in groups small or large, would have resisted Nazi depredations?
One wonders what thoughts may have occurred to Alfred Flatow in 1942 when he was dying of starvation at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Perhaps memories of the 1896 Olympics and of a better Germany flashed before his eyes. Did he have second thoughts, maybe repeated many times before, on whether he should have registered his revolver and two pocket pistols in 1932 as decreed by the Weimar Republic? Or whether he should have obediently surrendered them at a Berlin police station in 1938 as ordered by Nazi decree, only to be taken into Gestapo custody? We will never know, but it is difficult to imagine that he had no regrets.
Owen H. says:
Yet again, comparing any regulation of firearms with being a Nazi. I’d explain the depth of my feelings, but I’d get banned. I’ll stick with raving lunacy.
November 9, 2010, 6:40 pmCrazyTrain says:
If only the Germans had opposed the building of railroads then the Jews could not have been shipped to the East. Never again — all civilized people should oppose railroads.
November 9, 2010, 6:42 pmbill says:
Absolute insanity (the post that is). The usual “someone evil did something, so it must be wrong”, a bit more shrill than usual.
November 9, 2010, 6:43 pmMithras says:
Not sure where you’re going with this. Are you comparing the U.S. to Weimar Germany?
November 9, 2010, 6:45 pmMatthew Carberry says:
Capabilities, not intentions.
If you deny a government, however benign, the capability to perform an action you no longer have to worry about its intentions changing.
Given that gun registration in practice doesn’t appear to have actually achieved any proposed compelling government interest in public safety what then is the reason for allowing a registry which has the capability of being misused?
The burden of justifying the thing is on the proponant of a registry not the critic. Not “what harm” but rather “what good”?
November 9, 2010, 6:52 pmGoju says:
Considering the difficulties the Nazis had clearing the Waraw ghetto, armed Jews apparently were something they needed to be scared of.
November 9, 2010, 6:52 pmCDR D says:
1938 was 72 years ago. You might want to correct that, since the moonbats are already out in force to debunk your post.
November 9, 2010, 6:54 pm[DK: Thanks]
JRL says:
This doesn’t sound like an argument that gun control advocates are Nazis. It sounds like an argument that gun registration is a bad thing, and the Nazis’ use of gun registration is an example of why it is a bad thing.
November 9, 2010, 6:54 pmMithras says:
Clearly, it’s both. The first argument is offensive and stupid. The second argument is plausible, but comparing the uses of gun registration in modern America versus the minute chance of such records being used to oppress the citizenry (not to mention the absurdity of thinking small arms today in the hands of civilians have anything like the efficacy of small arms in 1938) deserves more than this mawkish excerpt.
November 9, 2010, 6:55 pmSteve says:
It bears noting that even among Holocaust survivors and their descendants, the proposition that “never again” means opposition to firearm registration is a minority position. While there are some who feel very strongly in favor of the argument articulated in the article, personally I’ve known many Holocaust survivors and not a single one of them owned a gun, to my knowledge. Certainly none of them carried.
November 9, 2010, 6:57 pmbill says:
Except that the argument is meaningless unless the government is a bunch of Nazis.
November 9, 2010, 6:57 pmDilan Esper says:
It may be tempting to argue that the possession of firearms by the German Jews would have made no difference, either in the 1938 pogrom or later in the Holocaust, when the majority were deported and then eradicated in death camps. Yet this fatalistic view ignores that the Nazis themselves viewed armed Jews as sufficiently dangerous to their policies to place great emphasis on the need to disarm all Jews.
I think the other commenters have already gotten to the ridiculousness of Professor Kopel’s point, but I will single out this quote for special criticism.
This is a classic example of a logical fallacy.
The claim Professor Kopel is purporting to refute is roughly as follows:
“The possession of firearms would not have stopped Nazi Germany from persecuting and eventually killing Jews.”
The evidence that one would need to refute this is some sort of evidence that in fact, Jews could have stopped the Nazis had they owned guns.
But that’s not what Professor Kopel provides. Instead he says, essentially:
“The Nazis thought it was important to strip Jews of their guns.”
The problem, though, is that this isn’t evidence that Jews could have stopped the Nazis had they owned guns. For instance, the Nazis could have disarmed Jews for other reasons. So for example, it may have been that even though they felt they could impose their control over the Jewish population even if they were armed, there would be fewer German military and civilian casualties if they disarmed Jews first. Or they wanted to terrorize other populations into submission by dragging out the persecution of the Jews and making a public show of disarming them. Or they wanted to repossess and appropriate the arms for their own military or police campaigns. Or they didn’t have the public support for more aggressive acts of persecution yet and were going one step at a time.
Or, alternatively, they could have thought what Professor Kopel says they thought about the prospect of armed Jews, but they might have been incorrect in their assessment.
Bottom line, if your contention is that disarming the Jews facilitated the later persecutions and murders, you have to show that. You can’t just say “they disarmed them before they persecuted them”. That’s post hoc ergo propter hoc.
November 9, 2010, 6:57 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
The Nazis were against cigarette smoking, too. Just saying!
November 9, 2010, 6:57 pmNathanM says:
I’ll admit I can’t even begin to imagine what a person would think about under such circumstances (although I doubt Mr. Halbrook is any more capable than I), but really? We are supposed to believe a man dying of starvation in a concentration camp regrets registering a few guns? I don’t see how things would have gone any better for Mr. Flatow if he had not. Is this what keeps opponents of gun registries up at nights?
November 9, 2010, 7:03 pmOwen H. says:
And Mussolini made the trains run on time. Clearly, keeping to a schedule is fascist.
November 9, 2010, 7:05 pmOwen H. says:
btw, I just wanted to apologize to all those that said that President Obama was going to take away their rights, ban guns, and all sorts of other nasty things. Oh wait, that didn’t actually happen (outside of their fevered imaginations), did it? I am reminded of the M-1 Garand bull***, which was promptly ignored when shown to be false.
November 9, 2010, 7:07 pmBrett Bellmore says:
Yes, this is related to the well known tendency of people who flee a dysfunctional society to recreate it’s problems where they move to; It’s easier to leave the evil, than leave it behind.
November 9, 2010, 7:08 pmSteve says:
Did he have second thoughts, maybe repeated many times before, on whether he should have registered his revolver and two pocket pistols in 1932 as decreed by the Weimar Republic? Or whether he should have obediently surrendered them at a Berlin police station in 1938 as ordered by Nazi decree, only to be taken into Gestapo custody? We will never know, but it is difficult to imagine that he had no regrets.
Honestly, it’s not that difficult to imagine. Many survivors of the Holocaust adopted nonviolence as a way of life. People are different. It’s hardly a given that victims of the Nazis universally thought, “If only I could have taken a couple of the bastards with me!”
I do happen to believe that the Holocaust teaches important lessons regarding gun rights, but the rhetoric of this article cheapens the cause. We don’t make Alfred Flatow’s fate any less horrible by forcing him to serve as the spokesman for a political cause that he may or may not have supported had he lived.
November 9, 2010, 7:12 pmSteve says:
Tell me, does it feel good to lecture Holocaust survivors on how they failed to learn the proper lessons from the deaths of their friends and family? I can imagine the smug expression on your face as you explain to them how you understand the moral considerations so much better than they do.
November 9, 2010, 7:16 pmMithras says:
Here’s an example of the uses of gun registration:
The article points out that part of the problem is that “straw purchase” is not illegal in Texas, and a gun owner may sell the gun to a private party without verifying the buyer’s identity, much less the background check a dealer would run. This is not true elsewhere in the U.S. In my state, Pennsylvania, straw purchases for a prohibited person (such as a felon) are a crime and no one may sell a handgun without doing it through a dealer, who will run a background check on the buyer.
Saying that Pennsylvania is risking tyranny by having such a gun sale system in place while Texas is somehow wise to allow guns to flow unchecked over the border to fuel gang warfare seems ludicrous.
November 9, 2010, 7:16 pmegd says:
Obviously Mr. Kopel doesn’t know what he’s talking about. We all know that the right wing is synonymous with Nazism and that the right wing opposes any sort of gun control, and therefore the right-wing are Nazis.
Any attempt to link a liberal, progressive, and elegantly refined position such as gun-control with the Nazi government must therefore be suspect.
November 9, 2010, 7:19 pmJames Gibson says:
What he is noting, which the other commenters don’t want to see is the pattern of first disarming the people you then intend to kill and then you kill them with leisure.
I think the first such case in written record is the book of Ester in which the Jews being held in exile in babylon are first ordered disarmed and then are to be killed by Babylonians. Perhaps not a true event, though there are numerous later events in which people are disarmed as a prelude to either their expulsion from an area or their termination as a people.
Take the Armenian genocide during World War 1. Treating people as second class citizens and baring them from having arms makes not just genocide easy, but all the crimes that preceded the genocide.
November 9, 2010, 7:23 pmyankev says:
No, the assumption that it is both is offensive and stupid. Most reasonable people would read it as only the second. But screaming that it’s necessarily the first is a convenient way to avoid addressing the argument.
November 9, 2010, 7:30 pmJames Gibson says:
What Garand Bull! The proposed new Assault Weapon law still contains the provision that would ban all Garand rifles in the United States because they potentially could be converted into a detachable magazine rifle like the BM-59E. And with Boxer running adds against Fiorina talking about the need for a new Assault Weapon law, the left wing hasn’t given up on this idea. In truth I expect Boxer to make a proposal in the lame duck session to try and get a new ban passed before the new Congress sits, banking on their control of the Senate to prevent a repeal. This even though it would destroy the reputation of people like you and Obama. But as long as they control the Senate, even loosing the Presidency in 2012 will not necessarily mean a subsequent repeal. Like in 2001 all they have to have is 41% of the Senate for a filibuster.
November 9, 2010, 7:31 pmCrunchy Frog says:
So of all the guns siezed across the border, %40 of the small number that were actually registered in the US came from a border state. Astounding.
In unrelated news, the majority of Mexican illegal aliens live in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
November 9, 2010, 7:33 pmSteve says:
That’s an inaccurate summary of the article. The examples discussed in the article involved Jews who were not disarmed and then later killed with leisure, but instead were disarmed and taken into custody at the exact same moment. Obviously anyone who is willing to peacefully surrender their weapons will be ripe for the slaughter if that’s the intent. The point of the article seems to be more about registration.
November 9, 2010, 7:33 pmyankev says:
Only to the extent that the Babylonians were then part of the Persian empire, as was much of the known world at the time, and were ordered — along with all other subjects — by the king of the Medes and Persians to take part in the slaughter.
November 9, 2010, 7:35 pmMithras says:
While it is important to get regular exercise, I doubt depriving people of the ability to engage in the shooting sports will result in their death by leisure.
November 9, 2010, 7:38 pmyankev says:
Even more astounding when you realize it was not 40% of of the small number that were actually registered in the US; it was 40% of the small number that were traced and found to be actually registered in the US came from a border state. Not every gun is traced.
November 9, 2010, 7:42 pmThe whole “Mexican drug cartels are buying guns in the US” has been thoroughly debunked by anyone who cares enough to read further. Very few US gun shops, even in Texas, carry full auto AK-47s, M-16′s and other select fire weapons favored by the gangs. A lot more of there weapons come from the Mexican police and army, or from foreign purchases, than from Texas. But Mexico has strict gun control and gun registration laws, and bans private ownership of most center-fire weapons, so it must be a safe place.
Mithras says:
yankev and Crunchy Frog-
November 9, 2010, 7:46 pmThe point is that being able to trace guns used in crime back to the person who bought them is a legitimate reason for registration.
bill says:
Except no one is saying that. You are inventing an stupid response to the stupid argument made by Kopel to make him look better.
November 9, 2010, 7:47 pmByomtov says:
Brett Bellmore,
Yes, this is related to the well known tendency of people who flee a dysfunctional society to recreate it’s problems where they move to; It’s easier to leave the evil, than leave it behind.
As a son of Holocaust survivors, I think you should shut the fuck up.
November 9, 2010, 7:49 pmJames Gibson says:
Are you sure of that? I have always found the Story of ester to more be in-line with events leading up to the fall of babylon by Cyrus the Great. I would interpret your comment to be you aline it with the reign of Xerxes 70 years later. I tend to view the interpretation of Xerxes as being the king in Ester as the same as the common references of Ramses as the Egyptian king in the Exodus.
November 9, 2010, 7:50 pmOwen H. says:
So what you are claiming is that any support for registration or any other form of regulation is driven by the desire to later commit genocide? As I said, raving lunacy.
November 9, 2010, 7:55 pmjww says:
My FFL instantly destroys records as soon as he is legally obligated to. He also keeps the records in a vault with some gasoline. He has told me and other customers that if the government comes for our guns, that vault is going up in flames. I appreciate that policy and support him with my business.
November 9, 2010, 7:57 pmFederal Farmer says:
I can’t tell if you are more ignorant about what comprises a “straw purchase” or about current Federal regulations. I assuring you, buying a gun for a known felon is just as illegal in Texas as it is in Pennsylvania.
Private sales of guns are legal in most states and should remain so. It is not the job of a private citizen legally selling a gun to assess the felony or citizenship status of the purchaser any more than it is their job to check that the purchaser of their car has a driver’s license.
November 9, 2010, 8:00 pmOwen H. says:
The bull**** about S. Korea trying to sell weapons they didn’t own being blocked.
Stop basing your arguments on what you think “they” want to do, and stick to what actually happens.
November 9, 2010, 8:04 pmFederal Farmer says:
You don’t have to look so far back, our own National History is replete with examples of disarming, relocating, and murdering Native Americans.
We had a President ignore a Supreme Court ruling and expel Native Americans west on what is known as the “Trail of Tears” and we honor that President by putting his face on our $20 bill.
We also incarcerated innocent Japanese-Americans during WWII.
It can’t happen here? It has. I’m not taking your promise on the future benevolence of my government.
November 9, 2010, 8:06 pmOwen H. says:
Our guns were supposed to be gone by now! Obama is not doing what the fear-mongers claimed!
November 9, 2010, 8:06 pmByomtov says:
Kopel,
What if the Nazis, when they took power in 1933 and disarmed social democrats and other political enemies, or when they decided to repress the entire Jewish population in 1938, did not have police records of registered firearm owners? Can it be said with certainty that no one, either individually or in groups small or large, would have resisted Nazi depredations?
Of course it can’t be said with certainty. So what? Are you seriously claiming that the fact that there might have been more resistance than there was would have prevented the slaughter? To start with, are you aware that German Jews represented only a small percentage of the victims? Over 90% were in countries or parts of countries occupied by the Nazis. What the hell did Weimar gun regulations have to with Poland?
November 9, 2010, 8:10 pmclaves curiae says:
Nuremburg, March 1, 1946:
Dr. Stahmer: Were these aims to be achieved by every means, even by illegal?
Goring: Of course, they were to be achieved by every means. The conception of “illegal” should perhaps be clarified. If I aim at a revolution, then it is an illegal action for the state then in existence. If I am successful, then it becomes a fact and thereby legal and a law…. the Fuhrer decided that we should in the future proceed legally …
November 9, 2010, 8:12 pmMithras says:
I’m trying not to sink to your level, so I’ll just reiterate the facts. In Pennsylvania, it is illegal to make a gun purchase on behalf of another person. That’s not true in Texas. In Pennsylvania, a private sale of a handgun must go through a FFL. (Long arms are exempt but it’s still good practice to do so). Not so in Texas. We have these requirements in Pennsylvania because we believe it’s important to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, not because we’re gearing up for a fascist takeover.
November 9, 2010, 8:13 pmCarl N. Brown says:
I think one can point out that gun control, like eugenics, was a policy used by Nazis without necessarily “comparing any regulation of firearms ” or eugenics “with being a Nazi”. Actually Don B. Kates in “Restricting Handguns” 1979 points out more directly that gun control has been used in the USA to disarm and victimize political and racial minorities. One cannot ignore historic abuse of policies (promoted with good intentions of course: Virginia Racial Integrity Act 1924-1975 for example) just because the advocates are not necessarily Nazis. When I rant against the Racial Integrity Act, I don’t compare all eugenics with being a Nazi, but, hey, if the jackboot fits….
November 9, 2010, 8:19 pmMithras says:
Federal Farmer-
November 9, 2010, 8:19 pmIt is illegal in Pennsylvania to buy a gun on behalf of another. Not so in Texas. In Pennsylvania all private sales of handguns must go through a FFL. Also not so in Texas. We have these requirements in Pennsylvania because we’re trying to keep guns out of criminals’ hands, not in order to commit genocide.
Andrew J. Lazarus says:
Sellers of a car in California are required to obtain (and file with DMV) the name and address of the purchaser. Nevertheless, no one has come to confiscate my car.
I am somewhat curious if Federal Farmer sees any problem with the easy transfer of weapons to known disqualified persons (viz., felons). It would appear not.
November 9, 2010, 8:21 pmmatt d says:
Straw purchases, which is knowingly buying guns to transfer them to someone who would be prohibited, certainly is illegal in Texas.
“Straw purchases” by the incorrect definition given in the article (non-background-checked private-party transactions) are not, however, legal in California. Like Pennsylania, which you cite approvingly, guns can’t be privately transferred in CA without going through a licensed dealer. California was #2 on the list of state sources for guns in Mexico, despite some of the strictest firearms laws in the nation (I’d put California at around third place on strictness off the top of my head).
-m@
November 9, 2010, 8:21 pmMithras says:
matt d-
November 9, 2010, 8:25 pmThe only point is that being able to trace guns used in crime back to the purchaser is a legitimate law enforcement goal, not a harbinger of totalitarianism.
Federal Farmer says:
Currently it is against Federal law to knowingly transfer a firearm to a disqualified person, in Texas and in Pennsylvania. I support that law.
I’ll add stubborn to ignorant. I’m not sure why you persist in mouthing falsehoods. Educate yourself and come back for commentary. If you persist, I must then assume you are not ignorant but have ill intentions.
November 9, 2010, 8:28 pmMithras says:
Federal Farmer-
November 9, 2010, 8:30 pmExactly what did I write that is false? In Pennsylvania, it is illegal to purchase a handgun for another person, even if that person is not a prohibited person. In Texas, this is not the case. In Pennsylvania, all private sales of handguns must go through a FFL. This is not the case in Texas. If you have information to the contrary, post it.
Owen H. says:
Oh, I see. Not Nazis, just racists.
November 9, 2010, 8:30 pmTomHynes says:
Mithras:
You said:
“The article points out that part of the problem is that “straw purchase” is not illegal in Texas”
Wikipedia says:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_purchase
In the context of United States federal gun laws, a straw purchase is defined as any purchase from a dealer holding a Federal Firearms License where the buyer conducting the transaction is acting as a proxy for another person. … In the United States, straw purchases are a felony violation of the Gun Control Act of 1968.
November 9, 2010, 8:31 pmShelbyC says:
Er, who on this blog has ever argued that? You sure the “lunacy” you’re talking about ain’t a little closer to home?
November 9, 2010, 8:32 pmDavid M. Nieporent says:
Uh, no. The argument (at least as quoted above) is against gun registration, which was NOT done by Nazis, but by the naive democrats of the Weimar Republic.
November 9, 2010, 8:33 pmOwen H. says:
And of course, democrats in the Weimar Republic are exactly the same as all other political organizations that call themselves “democrats”, or espouse any form of firearms regulation.
November 9, 2010, 8:40 pmMithras says:
Tom Hynes-
Thanks for the clarification. I always thought of “straw purchase” as buying a gun for another, whether that person is a prohibited person or not, but that only a straw purchase for a prohibited person was illegal.
Federal Farmer-
November 9, 2010, 8:46 pmNow I understand what you were saying. I was mistaken about the straw purchase law. My point was that registration is an important law enforcement tool in enforcing that law and isn’t a step on a slippery slope to confiscation.
Joseph Slater says:
Seconded. And how ironic, given Ilya Somin’s recent posts on this blog about how Soviet totalitarianism helped shape his politics.
November 9, 2010, 8:47 pmfinally, ALL things considered says:
This topic is to cry.
An unregistered firearm allows for proper venting of opinion, else submission to the devices of those who would coerce you into otherwise
as in Gasp! you’re history vs. Bang! you’re dead. The latter at least allows for a higher caliber of spirited debate
November 9, 2010, 8:48 pmlimaxray says:
Mithras – Actually, PA only restricts the private transfer of handguns, except between immediate family members or law enforcement officers. Rifles and shotguns can be transfered privately. Straw purchases are illegal throughout the US. Check out the NRA-ILA for a good breakdown of the various state laws.
As for registration serving some law enforcement purpose, do you have any evidence that registration has been successful in providing convictions where registration is currently required?
In NY, handgun registration is required, and a spent casing must be submitted for ‘ballistic fingerprinting’; it is my understanding that in all of the years this has been required, it has provided very little value to law enforcement, despite its significant cost to tax payers and burden to lawful gun owners.
I’m also under the impression that Canada is back peddling on their registration system because of its ineffectiveness to solve crimes.
November 9, 2010, 8:55 pmDay Break says:
Well said.
November 9, 2010, 8:57 pmFederal Farmer says:
Gun registration in Chicago has only been used for confiscation, that I’m aware of. I have seen no evidence that they have ever solved a crime using data in the gun registration system. I’m sure Chicago would have brought it up during the McDonald lawsuit had that been the case.
California has also followed gun registration with confiscation.
November 9, 2010, 9:01 pmChrisTS says:
Holy Mama.
The OP is an example of terrible reasoning (I don’t think it rises to the level of an argument).
Beyond that, we have Brett ridiculing those deranged surviors of the Holocaust for not recognizing that German Jews’ having had guns would have stopped the Nazis. And, then, JWW extolling the virtues of his favorite gun dealer for maintaining a firestorm-ready business to thwart the evil govmnint.
As far as I can tell, guns would not have helped German Jews stop the Nazis. (I cannot help but wonder if the Poles, Roma, Dutch, et alia had any guns.) Perhaps a few of those German citizens could have killed some of their murderous oppressors. Good, for what it might have been worth.
But the real point is that the Nazis had already started to persecute and oppress Jews and others. ‘Disarming’ them simply made the last steps less costly.
It is not being armed that protects us from a runaway government, in the first instance; rather, it is not letting our government become a runaway oppressive force. Those who despise rationality, respect, and civility – and extoll even the most zenophobic and ignorant forms of populism – might think more about the root sources of Nazism and less about who was or was not armed after the Nazis came to power.
I admit that I do not get the ‘guns for all’ view, and I certainly do not mean to include all gun rights proponents in the class of those who “despise rationality, respect, and civility – and extoll even the most zenophobic and ignorant forms of populism.” I do not want the government to tell me that I cannot have any kind of firearm (or bow/knife/etc.)anymore than anyone else does.
But, I think it is obscene (I use that term intentionally) to use the disarmanent of German Jews as a proxy ‘argument’ for unlimited guns rights in the U.S.A. This is a form of demagoguery worthy of the worst pundits and extremists on all sides.
November 9, 2010, 9:06 pmMithras says:
limaxray-
Yes, I think I mentioned upthread that long arms can be transferred in PA between private parties without going through a dealer.
In Pennsylvania, 504 people have been arrested in the past 4 years for straw purchases and gun trafficking. Without registration, those arrests would have been either impossible or much more difficult.
November 9, 2010, 9:07 pmlimaxray says:
PA doesn’t have a registration system.
November 9, 2010, 9:10 pmMithras says:
Federal Farmer-
November 9, 2010, 9:14 pmIn the context of this discussion, it’s interesting that the ADL filed an amicus brief (pdf) in McDonald on behalf of the City of Chicago. Respondent’s brief in the case is all about incorporation, not the practical effects of Chicago’s gun control scheme.
Byomtov says:
ChrisTS,
But, I think it is obscene (I use that term intentionally) to use the disarmanent of German Jews as a proxy ‘argument’ for unlimited guns rights in the U.S.A. This is a form of demagoguery worthy of the worst pundits and extremists on all sides.
Thank you. Kopel can advocate for whatever he likes, but I can’t think of a better word than “obscene” to describe his use, and Halbrook’s, of the Holocaust to promote his agenda.
I know something about what survival involved, and shooting handguns at the SS wasn’t it.
November 9, 2010, 9:15 pmCarl N. Brown says:
Quote: “”Sellers of a car in California are required to obtain (and file with DMV) the name and address of the purchaser. Nevertheless, no one has come to confiscate my car.”"
Is registration and licensing of cars in California handled like registration and licensing of guns in New York City under their implementation of the Sullivan Act? Or Australia?
640,000 pump and semi auto rifles and shotguns registered by law abiding gun owners in Australia were confiscated and destroyed in 1996.
When you have American gun control advocates expressing open hostility to possession of any firearms, registration schemes get viewed with suspicion.
November 9, 2010, 9:16 pmMithras says:
The law provides:
Are you distinguishing a registration system maintained by the state from record retention by the dealer? Is there much of a difference?
November 9, 2010, 9:19 pmKirk Parker says:
Mithras,
Straw purchases are illegal everywhere in the US, by federal law.
In addition, the misreported statistic that most guns smuggled into Mexico are obtained via retail or private sale in the US has been debunked many times over.
November 9, 2010, 9:20 pmRKV says:
Well Byomtov, all your knowledge of holocaust survival aside, I think that Alexander Solzhenytsyn had it right (and not you, btw, because I sincerely doubt your knowledge of holocaust survival)..
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
I firmly agree with the poster above who noted (if I may paraphrase) – once you remove the capability, your worry about intentions can be reduced. Having a counter-force to the the government, even if less than perfect, is still a valid method of risk reduction.
November 9, 2010, 9:29 pmShelbyC says:
What, precisely, is wrong with pointing out that registraion requirements facilitated the disarmament of German Jews as an example of the dangers of registration? Seems pretty relevant to me.
November 9, 2010, 9:35 pmByomtov says:
RKV,
Well Byomtov, all your knowledge of holocaust survival aside, I think that Alexander Solzhenytsyn had it right (and not you, btw, because I sincerely doubt your knowledge of holocaust survival)
Are you calling me a liar?
Do you think the Nazis sent out “security operatives?” No. They didn’t.
Fuck you, anonymous RKV, who lectures others from behind a mask of initials. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
November 9, 2010, 9:36 pmmichael livingston says:
This is a pleasant thought but largely anachronistic. The Jews were less than one percent of the population and not really organized among themselves. Firearms would have offered symbolic resistance but not much more. It is a different question whether a society that valued individual rights, like the 2nd Amendment, might have been less amenable to Nazism in the first place (Jews and non-Jews alike). The answer to this may well be, yes.
November 9, 2010, 9:37 pmfinally, ALL things considered says:
“I know something about what survival involved, and shooting handguns at the SS wasn’t it.”
Hiding, escaping or collaborating, then?
Me? I would’ve shot the sonsofbitches, many of them. Or myself, last resort before the cattlecar coralling and annihilation by gassholes.
The Jews, gypsies, Catholics, gay, lame and others should not have been so civilized in the face of barbarity.
Bullets seem inherently impartial but can be, and often are, applied morally. Gun rights allow for this good, while gun control snuffs it along with too many peoples’ lives.
November 9, 2010, 9:38 pmKatahdin says:
I’m curious what kind of time frame you are operating under? Is it unlikely that a despot will arise in the U.S. in the next 20 years? 50 years? 500 years? I would submit that a)the historical record argues that, given enough time, a despot will arrive and b), said despot will not hesitate to use whatever laws exist to his advantage.
This really mystifies me. What significant improvements have been made in small arms since 1938?
November 9, 2010, 9:38 pmkarrde says:
mithras, the article cited has another problem.
I will explain the problem in a thought-experiment.
Suppose the Federales in Mexico find 1,000 guns in a certain arms cache used by gangs. They notice that 100 of those guns have marking of American manufacture/sale (serial numbers, brand-names, etc.). They then turn those 100 guns over to American authorities, who find 400 of them were originally sold in Texas, and might have gone through one (or more) private sales before ending up in criminal hands for transport to Mexico.
A news story would repeat that 40% of the guns traced came from Texas…but I notice that 10% of the guns seized were turned over, and 4% of the guns seized came from Texa.
What happened to the other 900 guns?
How do we know the number of guns seized, vs. the number of guns turned over to American authorities for tracing? Does the article mention that? If not, why not?
Since we’ve already established (see above) that the article misuses the term ‘straw purchase’, and wrongly implies that such purchases are not illegal in Texas, why should I trust the article to distinguish between guns seized and guns turned over to the US for tracing?
November 9, 2010, 9:39 pmByomtov says:
ShelbyC,
What, precisely, is wrong with pointing out that registraion requirements facilitated the disarmament of German Jews as an example of the dangers of registration? Seems pretty relevant to me.
Two things:
1. To what degree did that disarmament, facilitated or not, aid in the destruction of German Jews. Answer: not much.
2. Would the Holocaust not have occured without that disarmament? (Hint: it would have, in part because the victims overwhelmingly did not live in Germany, so German laws are irrelevant.
November 9, 2010, 9:42 pmCarl N. Brown says:
Straw purchase is a federal crime (http://www.atf.gov/pub/fire-explo_pub/2005/p53004/index.htm Department of Justice, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, ATF P 5300.4 -
Federal Firearms Regulations Reference Guide 2005 (Revised – 9/05)] starting on Page 165, 15. STRAW PURCHASES, covers it.)
It does get tiresome to point out that 80% of guns siezed in Mexico are obviously not US origin; of the 20% of guns that appear to be US origin, of those submitted to ATF tracing, 90% are confirmed as US origin. Some of those were supplied by the US govt to Mexican military or police.
Smuggling from overseas (Asia, Middle East), illegal traffick from Central and South America, and theft from military and police, are far more frequently the source of Mexican drug cartel weapons than US civilian sales smuggled to Mexico. I am talking shipping container size loads.
Car trunk loads of guns being smuggled into Mexico, which often get publicised, are often on behalf of civilians caught between rampant kidnappings by gangs and the indifference of their own corrupt police.
Claiming that 90% of Mexican crime gun trace to US sales, though, makes an argument for reviving the Assualt Weapon Ban (which according to CDC 2003 and NAS 2004 had no measurable benefit).
November 9, 2010, 9:47 pmMithras says:
Great point. However, I doubt that a despot will need or want to disarm the citizenry. It’s far easier for him to claim the mantle of patriotism and direct the anger of the majority against a despised, foreign-seeming minority. The rest is easy.
Just the opposite. Given modern weapons that are available to the military and law enforcement and not to regular people, civilian small arms are now much less effective as a check on government power.
November 9, 2010, 9:50 pmCharlie says:
So the Nazis’ assessment of the danger posed by Jews is evidence for the reality of that danger? Is that methodology limited to the gun control question or can we also apply it to the danger of Jewish involvement in art, finance and politics?
November 9, 2010, 9:50 pmfinally, ALL things considered says:
Law-abiding citizens follow the law.
Law-abiding Jews and scapegoated sub-populations who followed the law in Nazi Germany mostly died at the hands of the State. And mostly died without killing their armed persecutors.
Gun registration laws served the State and nobody else. But of course.
November 9, 2010, 9:51 pmFlooey says:
I’m glad at least one commenter mentioned the Warsaw ghetto. When the order was given to finally liquidate the ghetto–19 April 1943, I think–it was considered that it would take three days to finish the work. In the event, it took a month.
Thus, the resistance to the liquidation essentially increased the ghetto dwellers remaining lifespan, at least of the last to go, by 1000%. This was accomplished through the use of makeshift explosives and a few guns smuggled in. The unplanned extra 27 or so days of fighting cost the Germans men, materiel, and time. Imposing such costs on one’s enemy, stubbornly, repeatedly, is how wars are won.
For that bitter month, the ghetto dwellers were allies of three of the most powerful nations on earth, all of whom also lost individual battles but ultimately prevailed. Imagine a thousand Warsaw ghettoes, and better armed ones, and it’s not impossible that the war might have ended sooner that it did, saving untold thousands of lives, including many of those who were murdered in camps and pits late in the war.
The ghetto story suggests the Nazis had good reason to view “armed Jews as sufficiently dangerous to their policies.”
November 9, 2010, 9:54 pmRicardo says:
As Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt pointed out, in some European cities there were special Jewish police forces who were tasked with rounding up Jews and putting them on trains to be deported to concentration camps — it wasn’t always the SS or the regular police. Were those Jewish police officers armed? If so, that seems to weigh against the idea that there would have been widespread armed resistance to the Nazis within the Reich.
True, a lot of this happened after Kristallnacht when the Nazis had time to consolidate and solidify their totalitarian power. But the above post seems to underestimate just how effective the Nazis were in convincing people to go along with their program even in the absence of direct threats of violence.
November 9, 2010, 9:59 pmElemenope says:
Those who despise rationality, respect, and civility — and extoll even the most zenophobic and ignorant forms of populism
I too despise Zeno of Elea and all he stands for, but at least we can be confident that any popular movement of his won’t get far.
:)
November 9, 2010, 10:00 pmByomtov says:
Flooey,
Bear in mind that the Warsaw Ghetto was a very densely populated urban enclave. That was not true of most ghettos. It is unjustified to generalize from the Warsaw Ghetto to those in smaller cities and towns.
And of course the Warsaw Ghetto was ultimately liquidated. The cost was much greater than the Nazis expected, it’s true. But the Nazi determination to exterminate Jews was not much influenced by rational concerns. Even near the end of the war they were diverting trains from critical military supply routes to carry Jews to concentration camps.
November 9, 2010, 10:05 pmrascalfair says:
This thread is really amazing. Such depth of analysis could only be substituted for common sense by a gaggle of law professors. The article refers not to gun registration or sensible laws but to the disarming of a civilian population that was therefore unable to defend itself against the power of the State. “Analysis” of what a dying man may have felt, and acceptance of dubious statistics on Mexican gun sources and fully thrashing that beast to death only adds to the general tenor of unreality of your thinking. If you guys are really law profs, it’s no wonder that our state of governance is in such sorry disrepair. Get a life.
November 9, 2010, 10:06 pmRowerinVa says:
Exactly! For example, all those Holocaust refugees in the late 1940s, in the territory now known as Israel, who concluded that owning rifles was eeeeeevil, and nonviolent resistance was the only acceptable path. A sentiment unanimously endorsed by their descendants in the present day.
Heh.
November 9, 2010, 10:09 pmAaron says:
Mussolini didn’t make the trains run on time, he just made it very dangerous to say that the trains were running late.
November 9, 2010, 10:10 pmCharlie says:
rascalfair says:
From the article:
November 9, 2010, 10:11 pmKen Arromdee says:
Well, he did do all sorts of other nasty things. As for the guns, he’s not all powerful. He hasn’t done much gun control because people would fight it. Claiming that because he didn’t do much of it there was no danger is like saying that the bank doesn’t need any guards because after all there haven’t been any robberies. What do you think is preventing the robberies?
November 9, 2010, 10:23 pmsvi says:
re: straw purchases
You may not, ever, purchase a firearm on behalf of another person, not in PA and certainly not in Texas. This is a federal crime.
November 9, 2010, 10:30 pmRicardo says:
I’m in the middle of reading Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” so these questions are fresh in my mind. It’s not clear there is a strong connection between support for the 2nd Amendment and support for individual rights in general. That may be true for some people but certainly not all.
On the other hand, Arendt points out that the people of Denmark were able to stop the worst of the Holocaust from happening in their country largely through non-violent resistance. The Holocaust was not perpetrated by a small handful of psychopaths: it required the willing cooperation and coordination of thousands of people. In Germany, obedience to authority (and certainly to the Fuehrer) had developed into a secular religion but the Danes would have none of it. There was widespread sabotage of Nazi plans by nearly every element of Danish society from ordinary civil servants to members of civil society and dockworkers. The result is that most Jews were able to safely emigrate to Sweden. 99% of Danish Jews survived the Holocaust with few or any shots fired.
November 9, 2010, 10:31 pmElemenope says:
Well, he did do all sorts of other nasty things. As for the guns, he’s not all powerful. He hasn’t done much gun control because people would fight it.
I’m idly curious how many of the “cold dead hands” folks would actually resist a disarmament law by force of arms.
Seriously, let’s say a law was passed that deprived people who now own firearms for personal defense the ability to continue to do so and (contra Heller and Macdonald) was upheld by the courts. When the guy or gal in the ATF jacket shows up to seize your guns, or whatever, are you gonna shoot em? Because if the answer is generally no (and I believe it is no, despite some posturing to the contrary; most people are not willing to take a life to protest against a bad law) then being armed is no bulwark against tyranny, since the arms can be pried from citizen hands by fairly costless means. Pretty much all you have to do is ask politely.
I tend to think an analysis of such a situation is relevant to the general viability of the argument that an armed populace is a more difficult populace to oppress.
November 9, 2010, 10:36 pmRowerinVa says:
That’s not correct. If by “power” you mean the ability to kill or capture armed people hiding in an urban environment, the police and military tools of today aren’t much advanced versus those of the 1930s. The best main battle rifle of the 1930s — the M1 Garand — differs from still-in-use equivalents such as the M-14 mainly just in magazine capacity (8 then versus 20 to 30 today), which is not a huge advantage in this context. Bolt-action guns continue to be the sniper’s default, and those were fully developed long before the 1930s. And as for pistols, the 1911 .45 was decades old by the 1930s, and is still going strong today; many similar pistol designs can make the same claim.
True, a government today could simply bombard a city block. But so could a government in the 1930s. Modern aerial and artillery bombardment is only marginally more effective today than in the 1930s — compare the WWII effects on Dresden and Tokyo versus any modern example, if you doubt me. The current weapons’ main advantage is precision use against high value targets, such as bridges, but modern weapons are essentially equivalent to those of the 1930s when you are talking about area bombardment.
A lone gunman could not resist a government indefinitely in 1776, 1930, or today — no one claims otherwise. But a large group of people with 1930s weapons and some masonry to hide behind could resist attack for a very long time even by a modern government. As the US has learned in the past few years — many of the weapons faced in Afghanistan qualify as antiques.
I don’t think the OP claims that the Jews could have beaten the Nazis. I believe his point is more that, at the very least, an armed minority could force the government to unveil the full extent of its brutality, rather than permitting the government to shuffle its victims off to concentration camps out of the public view.
I’m not supporting the original post, by the way. I am merely pointing out some obvious flaws in the comment stream.
November 9, 2010, 10:39 pmsardonic_sob says:
This? This right here? This is the difference between people who believe that the right to bear arms is of fundamental importance, and those who do not.
Mr. Flatow would have been dead either way, to four nines or better. I’ll grant you that. But either you think that dying on your feet is an inherently better death than dying on your knees, or you do not. If you don’t, then the point of view quoted makes perfect sense, and the point the OP makes is ridiculous bravado. If you do, then the point of view quoted is nonsensical at best and craven at worst. While people can and do cross over from one to the other on an individual basis, nobody ever argued anybody to the other side. Frankly, I don’t see why people bother to argue about it.
November 9, 2010, 10:55 pmsardonic_sob says:
More than you think, fewer than you fear. Why do you care?
November 9, 2010, 10:57 pmFlooey says:
Byomtov, you write, “But the Nazi determination to exterminate Jews was not much influenced by rational concerns.”
I made no suggestion that the Nazis would respond rationally to resistance. Resistance created losses for them. And they lost the war, ultimately, through the accretion of losses great and small.
Ricardo, you write, “…In Germany, obedience to authority (and certainly to the Fuehrer) had developed into a secular religion but the Danes would have none of it.”
You answered your own argument, explaining exactly why the Jews in Germany (and Austria after March ’38) could not depend on the Danish method; the Germans were not like the Danes. Nor were the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Byelorussians, etc. Are you suggesting that Jews in Germany and Austria would have survived by “non-violent sabotage of Nazi plans”? You cannot be serious.
November 9, 2010, 11:17 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
In discussion like this, I find Bettelheim more useful than Solzhenitsyn, and certainly more useful than those who have not been tested who fantasize how much better they would do should the time come.
BYomTov points out that weapons seem to have been little help to any number of others. Does Kopel have any explanation why Russian soldiers surrendered to the Germans, even though almost all of them died as POWs? Surely he doesn’t think Russian soldiers were unarmed.
Just for the record, the Jewish ghetto policemen did not carry firearms. I believe they did have truncheons.
November 9, 2010, 11:20 pmGuy says:
Or at least he doesn’t seem to be gaining popularity at this exact moment.
November 9, 2010, 11:26 pmStill need a new handle says:
This has got to be the worst VC post ever. I would love to be disproven.
It is not a tenable point. We know what exactly what the result of Jewish armed resistance during the late 1930s was: Kristallnacht. (Recall the Nazis’ pretext for this: Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish refugee in Paris, killed a German embassy official to protest German treatment of Jews.) The brutality was there for all to see. “Ordinary Germans” tolerated this. Please don’t buy into their claims to have known nothing. Do you really think they would have turned against the Nazis if more Jews had shot “good German” policemen, soldiers, etc.? I doubt it.
November 9, 2010, 11:30 pmElemenope says:
More than you think, fewer than you fear. Why do you care?
I don’t fear an eventuality of armed uprising, I just personally think it vanishingly improbable to occur in reaction to a gun control measure. I care only academically; the answer would speak to whether the claim that the populace owning guns is actually a significant impediment to tyrants.
November 9, 2010, 11:36 pm1040 says:
by the perfectly correct logic of your post, do you support f-16 and missile possession by citizens in the modern usa, dk? and is anybody who makes an argument against such a thing a brownshirt?
November 9, 2010, 11:41 pm1040 says:
this kind of comment is a real insult to lindgren.
November 9, 2010, 11:42 pm1040 says:
i think that’s unfair. based on personal interaction with smart lawyers, as well as posts by ev, ok and the like on this blog, one really gets a sesnse of the formalism with which sensible and serious law professionals argue their points.
November 9, 2010, 11:44 pmbill says:
Beat me to it. This post isn’t nearly as unhinged as the birthday card one.
November 9, 2010, 11:45 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
That’s what rifles (the other item that gun control advocates like to ban) are for. If you have any doubt, read the chapter on armed Jewish resistance in Leni Yahil’s The Holocaust: The Fate of the European Jewry, 1932-1945 or Gutman’s Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
Of course, it was not just the Weimar Republic’s laws aimed at the Nazis and Communists disarming the Jews that played a part in what happened. Jews were largely unarmed in much of the rest of Europe as well before World War II. There was also an Eastern European tradition of non-resistance to pogroms because fighting back generally made matters worse. Pogroms were intense but short efforts; allowing some to die often meant the survival of the community as a whole. Hitler, however, was not engaged in an emotional outburst; his goal was extermination.
The reluctance of Orthodox Jews to make common ground with Zionists until far too late certainly plays a part in what happened in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but there were a number of uprisings (with guns) in Eastern Europe that were somewhat successful. (Success defined as allowing some fraction of the population to escape.) The chapter in Yahil’s book describes how Lithuanian Jews were working in a German machine gun factory, and managed to smuggle out an entire belt fed machine gun, piece by piece, and ammunition. When the SS came to liquidate their ghetto, that belt-fed machine gun, a few random small arms, and pitchforks, allowed about 10% of the community to escape into the forests, where many survived the war.
It makes you wonder what would have happened if the Jews of Eastern Europe had been armed as well as the average American. Certainly, the Nazis would have killed many Jews. But eventually, the costs in terms of dead Nazis would have made this task not simply disagreeable (as it was to many German soldiers assigned to Einsatzgruppen duty), but downright dangerous.
November 9, 2010, 11:45 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
I can think of two uprisings that were a direct response to gun control: the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and the Barcelona Uprising during the Spanish Civil War.
November 9, 2010, 11:47 pmmack says:
There is a gun rights organization called Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership (JPFO) http://jpfo.org/ but perhaps those that are so outraged by Mr. Kopel’s post should not visit that website since they are far more direct and explicit about historical connections between gun control and genocide and mass murder by government.
Registration has been used for confiscation in this country including in NY and CA- gun control has been used in this county to control “undesirable” racial groups – Native Americans, African Americans, and Irish Americans. The right to self defense in the form of concealed carry has and is still in many states and cities prohibited to the average citizen but available to the rich and connected.
Registration has in many countries been the prelude to confiscation – most recently England and Australia.
The leaders in the gun control movement in this country have publicly acknowledged that they wish to ban guns and that they see registration as a necessary step in doing so. (a side note on Obama and gun control – our president was a board member of the anti-gun Joyce Foundation – the woman he wanted appointed to his old senate seat who is still in his administration is still on the board, his attorney general Eric Holder is on record advocating for re-instituting a so called assault weapons ban. The only reason that Obama and the democrats in the Senate and House have not acted to enact more and more gun control is because they don’t have and didn’t have the votes to do so – since the NRA and individuals who support the RKBA have worked and continue to work like hell to elect pro-gun rights representatives and senators republican and democrat.)
Registration has never had any significant impact on crime – the federal governments own studies and report on the efficacy of gun control law acknowledges it. Canada has spent millions on a registration system that has been woefully ineffective and useless – such that even in socialist Canada they are proposing scrapping it.
But perhaps most pathetic is the idea that resistance to possible future or to historical tyranny is futile. Perhaps all those insurgents/terrorists in Afghanistan should realize they can’t win and surrender now – just like they couldn’t win against the soviets. Or the elitist and pathetic idea that average citizens should not or cannot be trusted with firearms or the basic means of protecting their lives and freedom.
Reminds me of two quotes:
“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” – Churchill
And this one:
“If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”—Samuel Adams
But if you would rather get on the cattle car with you family because you are certain it will take you to Disneyland – then be my guest. Just don’t expect many of the rest of us to get on board with you – and if you plan to legislate that we do so then be prepared for the consequences of trying to enforce it.
November 9, 2010, 11:50 pmRicardo says:
You need to read more carefully. I was responding to someone who already agrees with me that armed resistance would likely have been ineffective and that instead one has to look at the character of the society to determine whether or not a Holocaust could occur there.
Moreover, I pointed out that the historical scholarship of Raul Hilberg has demonstrated the painful fact that the Holocaust in many places (including the cities of Germany) depended not just on local collaboration but on Jewish collaboration. The Nazis were able to corrupt many prominent and formerly respected members of the Jewish community which pretty much ruled out any significant organized resistance from the start. With 20/20 hindsight, of course, it is easy to imagine alternative scenarios where this would not have happened. The point is that the Nazis were expert manipulators, liars and flatterers and the most important disarming that took place was of a pscyhological kind.
Many Jews could not have imagined (or were unwilling to admit to themselves) the full scale of the horror that awaited them and so cooperation up until at least 1940 seemed like the better course. Then even once they realized how bad things were, it was too late and the focus was on trying to negotiate for the freedom of a certain number of Jews — negotiations that were almost always fraudulent and in bad faith from the Nazi side.
November 9, 2010, 11:51 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
You think soldiers are never going to get out of their tanks and helicopter gunships?
November 9, 2010, 11:51 pmGil says:
I agree with others here in saying had Jews initially fought back and killed Nazi Officers then it probably wouldn’t have made much difference. The Nazis wouldn’t have been stupid enough to keep sending officers to knock on front doors only to be killed by a hail of bullets. Instead Nazis would have said “told you the Jews were evil so we need to step it up”. The next time officers were sent they would have arrived in tanks, blasted the front wall off, sprayed umpteen bullets killing the armed Jews inside, and dropping the building trapping anyone who might be hiding the basement with ten tons of rubble. The fact that Nazi Germany proceeded to make war with half of Europe shows they weren’t afraid that their enemies would have arms. Perhaps the best solution against such an emerging powerful enemy is get the hell out there before they come after you.
November 9, 2010, 11:59 pmClayton E. Cramer says:
You miss two points:
1. There was considerable disapproval of what the Nazis were doing. Some Germans did fight back, with their lives. You might want to read Target: Hitler for some of the many conspiracies (some more effective than others) against him. A serious fight against the Nazi government might well have caused many Germans, if they perceived a serious possibility of success, of joining the revolt.
2. Many of those who commit horrendous crimes because they were “just following orders” do so because they don’t want to get in trouble by refusing orders. Consider two scenarios: you are ordered to round up Jews and shoot them in a ditch.
In the first scenario, the Jews are at no risk of hurting you, but refusing your orders will get you courtmartialed, sent to prison, or perhaps sent to the Russian Front, where the people you shoot at will shoot back. Unless you have a strong conscience, most people follow orders, even unpleasant orders.
In the second scenario, the people that you are supposed to round up and shoot are shooting back. Suddenly the balance of power has changed: the officer giving you an order that you find unpleasant and disagreeable may do you some serious harm, by shooting you or courtmartialing you. But your victims are going to try and kill you if you come after them. Hmmmm. Maybe your conscience gets the better of you, and you desert, or change sides.
We have examples of this, by the way, during the 1877 railroad strikes in the U.S. National Guard units in a number of cities were given grossly unlawful orders to fire on unarmed and often peaceful strikers. In a few cities, the strikers had guns–and in a number of those situations, the National Guards refused their unlawful orders, or changed sides.
November 10, 2010, 12:00 amRicardo says:
It’s tough to imagine Einsatzgruppen duty being any more dangerous than, say, actually fighting on the Eastern Front. I don’t think anyone is disputing the fact that firearms could have made a difference at the margin. Rather the point is that the Holocaust would have happened anyway with pretty similar results. In places where there was real resistance to the Holocaust like Belgium and Denmark, that resistance was almost entirely of an unarmed nature and was extremely effective. In Romania, on the other hand, anti-Semitism was so visceral and extreme that it probably would not have mattered at all if every Jew had a gun — this probably would have just led to even more sadistic pograms and reprisals sponsored by the locals.
November 10, 2010, 12:02 amClayton E. Cramer says:
Wow! The death toll would have been really high then for the Jews, wouldn’t it?
The fact is that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising tied up a lot of troops that could have been killing other civilians or even (gasp) soldiers. A hundred similar events across Eastern Europe would have been a pretty costly action for the Nazis–and it could not have killed any more Jews than walking peacefully into the gas chambers did.
November 10, 2010, 12:02 ammack says:
Remember this radical gun nut who said:
“Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America but which historically has proven to be always possible.”
November 10, 2010, 12:02 am- Senator Hubert H. Humphrey – Democrat
Clayton E. Cramer says:
And this would have been worse for the Jews how? Maybe the death toll would have been the same (although I doubt it), but no matter how much Jews were hated in Eastern Europe, self-preservation would make even the most virulent haters ask the question, “Do I want to risk being killed by one of those Jews enough to try and kill them? Maybe I should wait for someone else to do this.”
November 10, 2010, 12:05 amClayton E. Cramer says:
And if they had been armed as well as the average American, and had not stupidly turned in their guns, in 1941, or 1942, when it becomes more apparent that this isn’t going to end well, they would have been in a position to fight back. That’s the reason that laws intended to facilitate disarming people are a bad idea.
November 10, 2010, 12:09 amShelbyC says:
How much is debateable of course. Folks can, of course, debate instead of calling the argument obscene. And wasn’t one of the reasons it didn’t happen is Switzerland due to the armed civilian population?
November 10, 2010, 12:12 amRicardo says:
There was not serious disapproval of the rounding up of Jews and their deportation. If there was, quite simply, it would not have happened. I have to cite Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” on this point again. In Belgium, train station managers “accidentally” left the cars of the deportation trains unlocked so that Jews could escape. Civil servants in some countries “lost” the lists that were compiled of registered Jews to be deported and would sometimes tip off Paul Revere types within the Jewish community when a deportation was about to happen. Things like this rarely if ever happened in Poland or Germany. Why? Because most Poles and Germans didn’t care and whatever opposition there was to the Nazis was not on philo-Semitic grounds.
Again, this argument has been brought up in courtrooms around the world and decisively rejected almost every time by the overwhelming amount of documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony to the contrary.
November 10, 2010, 12:15 amClayton E. Cramer says:
If 1% of American gun owners decided to violently (as opposed to surreptiously) resist, that would mean about 1.75 million people shooting back at the police. Unless you assume Nacht und Nebel seizures (appropriate for gun control advocates, of course), I’m guessing that about 5% of those incidents are to result in a dead police officer. That’s 87,500 dead cops from trying to enforce your liberal wet dream. Actually, it will more likely mean about 500,000 cops resigning from either disgust with such a law, or a desire to make it home at the end of his shift.
November 10, 2010, 12:15 amClayton E. Cramer says:
Things like this rarely happened in Poland or Germany because you would get killed if you did. I agree that many Poles and Germans did not much care what happened to Jews. But there were Germans who disapproved–just not enough to get themselves killed over it.
What has been rejected is this as a legal defense. One of the reasons for the development of the mobile gassing vans, and then the concentration camps, was that members of the Einsatzgruppen did their jobs, but they were not happy about it, and some tried to avoid it. You might want to read Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Some members did their jobs enthusiastically. Some did their jobs reluctantly. Some did their very best to avoid doing their job at all. And this was with victims that did not shoot back.
November 10, 2010, 12:21 amtomemos says:
“…either you think that dying on your feet is an inherently better death than dying on your knees, or you do not.”
“And if they had been armed as well as the average American, and had not stupidly turned in their guns, in 1941, or 1942…”
“…it could not have killed any more Jews than walking peacefully into the gas chambers did.”
The blaming of Holocaust victims for cowardice and passivity has now gone from implicit to explicit, as it was destined to do from the moment this thread began.
November 10, 2010, 12:23 amRicardo says:
That’s quite a shift of goalposts. The entire power of the argument against gun registration is that it is the ultimate bulwark against tyranny. Now, the argument that you are making is, “Well, maybe firearm ownership won’t do much to fight tyranny but it certainly won’t make it worse, now would it?” That’s probably true but it’s not a particularly compelling argument against gun registration.
Again, we are talking about a time of war. People were dying on the front lines every day. Armed resistance probably would have solidified in some people’s diseased minds that Jews really were the enemy and would have made them that much more determined to kill them off. The Nazis would have doubled-down on their propaganda that the Jews were Bolshevik fifth columnists and many illiterate peasants in the Eastern European countryside would have believed it.
November 10, 2010, 12:23 ammack says:
Clayton you are dealing with the people who believe in the theory that a woman lying dead in an alley is morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got shot. They cannot imagine actually taking action to defend themselves let alone the freedom that in truth they despise.
Resistance is always better than non-resistance – maintaining a spirit of resistance and the means to resist – will often preclude the actual need to resist – as those inclined to tyranny whether a local thug or a government – are risk adverse when it comes to their own skins.
November 10, 2010, 12:26 amAndrew J. Lazarus says:
Imagine is the operative word, indeed. As jerk-offs who didn’t face the Holocaust (or anything resembling one percent of it) compete for who can create the most compelling fantasy of what they could have done with their guns (not to mention their phasers).
This thread reminds me why I loathed “Inglorious Basterds”.
November 10, 2010, 12:34 amtomemos says:
“They cannot imagine actually taking action to defend themselves let alone the freedom that in truth they despise.”
And here it is again. The Jews secretly wanted to die; they didn’t have the will to defend themselves. Nor do we, who hate freedom and ourselves, untermenschen that we are.
November 10, 2010, 12:37 amPlugInMonster says:
Let’s be clear here. You are on record as being for the complete banning of firearms for private citizens, no?
November 10, 2010, 12:41 amElemenope says:
That’s 87,500 dead cops from trying to enforce your liberal wet dream.
Hey, *it’s not my wet dream*. I don’t want guns to be seized (as I think I’ve said, now, *Twice*, the question is only to determine the validity of the proposition that an armed populace is inoculated against tyranny). Learn to recognize hypotheticals, or tilt at windmills.
If your numbers are right, there might be something to the argument. I tend to think, however, that a combination of a general intrinsic hesitation to take life combined with a widespread desire to be law-abiding would place the number far lower than you think, especially if they decided to execute it any other way than the stupidest possible (i.e. not all at once, as you seem to assume they would).
November 10, 2010, 12:41 amStill need a new handle says:
I haven’t read the book, but unless I missed something important, wasn’t every single one of those anti-Hitler conspiracies decisively ineffective, inasmuch as none of them shortened his rule by even one day? Can you tell me something about the successful plots?
And is your theory that Jews would have acted as some sort of anti-Nazi vanguard for other Germans? Is that plausible? We’ll come back to that.
Oh, it’s worse than that. You read Ordinary Men I take it. For those men, the consequence of refusing orders to round up Jews and gas them in improvised vans or just shoot them in the back of the head was . . . being sent back to Germany to their ordinary duties as beat cops. It was not trial, summary punishment, or a ticket to Stalingrad. So you’re exactly right, most people (at least most Germans wearing uniforms during the era we’re discussing) will follow ghastly orders even if the refusal to follow orders carries no negative consequence. You don’t want to kill Jews? You don’t really have to! But most of them kept at it.
“What, you mean the enemy’s going to shoot at us?” Please. All that does is take conscience off the table and confirm what that officer is saying: the Jews are the enemy and must be killed. I love your example about the strikers and guardsmen but, really, that’s exactly the type of identification that was not occurring. The Nazis had taken great pains to prevent it.
Honestly, how Jewish armed resistance would have sparked other Germans to question and ultimately overthrow the Nazi regime is really beyond me. The Nazis nicely asking them to go kill unresisting Jews pretty much set the machine in motion. “Go do your job, and you job is killing Jews.”
Your theory seems to be that Jewish resistance would have caused the perpetrators and bystanders to say, “My God! What are we doing! We should be fighting on the Jews’ side against the Nazis!”
But I think the more likely result is that Jewish resistance would have simply confirmed in the perpetrators’ and bystanders’ minds that their government’s anti-Jewish policies were justified. The thing about those Nazis is, they were pretty good at getting people to agree with them.
I’d love to be wrong about this, I really would. But nothing from the history of the period makes me think that I am.
November 10, 2010, 12:43 ammack says:
I would imagine if one put the Jewish citizens of modern day Israel in Nazi Germany in place of their forebearers their response and the outcome of their response would be significantly different than what did happened. I think it is fair to say that the Jewish citizens of Israel in general do hold that armed resistance is to be prefered and that many hold that as a lesson of the Holocaust.
November 10, 2010, 12:44 ammack says:
tomemos – please stop projecting and putting words in peoples mouths – I was talking about some posters on this board and not about the Jews in Nazi Germany. As to you – well if the shoe fits.
November 10, 2010, 12:48 amRicardo says:
Yes, and how many of those who “tried to avoid it” actually faced death? Nobody has ever compiled a long list of people executed for refusing to carry out the final solution because, as far as anyone knows, it never happened. Most people complied, of course, but those who didn’t might have faced administrative sanctions or would have been demoted.
Your claim was that the final solution was carried out in Germany and Poland with such efficiency because many of those who might have opposed it were in fear of their lives (with the implicit argument that owning a gun would have reduced their fear). The historical record simply does not support that.
At best, the Jews of Eastern Europe were looked upon by most gentiles as troublesome foreigners who they were only too happy to get rid of. Whatever happened to the Jews after the trains left was not their concern. The Jews quite simply were outnumbered by people who hated them and armed resistance was least realistic option for doing anything about this state of affairs.
November 10, 2010, 12:50 amtomemos says:
Mack, I knew who you were talking about—the liberal untermenschen, I said that already. But I love that *right before* you say that you’re not blaming the Holocaust victims for their deaths, you come out with this:
“I would imagine if one put the Jewish citizens of modern day Israel in Nazi Germany in place of their forebearers their response and the outcome of their response would be significantly different than what did happened.”
You see? If the Jews had been good Tough Jews, Masculine Jews, they would have survived! Instead they were feckless Diaspora Jews, weak-willed born victims who feebly failed to keep themselves from being murdered, like the woman in the alley you were talking about earlier.
In your defense, you’re not the first one to try this line. Holocaust survivor Ruth Kluger’s book Still Alive talks about how much discourse around the Holocaust seethes with contempt for the victims, and she expressly mentions the “We ISRAELIS wouldn’t have stood for it!” perspective as part of that contempt.
November 10, 2010, 12:55 ammack says:
“Honestly, how Jewish armed resistance would have sparked other Germans to question and ultimately overthrow the Nazi regime is really beyond me.” – obviously so. Just as the idea of resisting tyranny is beyond so many here.
November 10, 2010, 12:56 ammack says:
No, tomemos – the Nazi’s were to blame for the holocaust – sorry you don’t grasp that fact. The innocent victims of the holocaust might have been able to save some of their number by resisting – but that isn’t “blaming them” – sorry you can’t read.
November 10, 2010, 1:01 amSLE says:
This is so absurdly off-base, it can only be a result of complete ignorance. I usually stay out of these gun-control arguments, because the signal-to-noise ratio is so low.
I’m a private citizen. I’ve never been in the military. I live in California. All the weapons I own are legal and I don’t have a FFL. I own a Springfield Armory M-1A, the civilian version of the M-14. It was used to great effect in Vietnam and was much preferred to the M-16. I own two M-1 carbines, used to great effect in both WWII and Korea. I own two Garands, also used to great effect in WWII and Korea. I own an Armalite AR10A4 (in Assault Weapon Ban configuration) in 7.62 NATO caliber. I own two SKS’s, used to great effect by the Viet Cong.
I own two Beretta 92F’s, the current standard issue handgun for the military. I own two 1911′s, the previous standard issue handgun, and still preferred by special forces.
I own two Remington 870 pump-action shotguns, which are identical to the standard “trench gun” used by the military even today.
I also own a number of other rifles, shotguns and handguns, but these are the ones I own which have a specifically military pedigree. I have collected these precisely because they have proven themselves on the battlefield. Tens of millions of these guns, and guns like them, exist in the hands of private citizens. There are also many thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands, of fully automatic weapons in the hands of private citizens, up to and including Gatling guns.
And I’m not even talking about illegal, and illegally-owned, guns!
Now I will grant you that explosive small arms, like grenades, grenade launchers, mortars and the like are not generally available to private citizens. But so what? The Afghani’s fought the Russians, with all their vaunted weaponry to a standstill, armed largely with WWI-era bolt-action Enfield rifles. They were eventually able to acquire more advanced weaponry the way most insurgencies do–via theft, bribery, ambush, etc. Even without the Stingers they eventually got from the US, they were winning that war. As they are winning now.
The American people own enough militarily-capable firearms to put the fear of god into even the most advanced military force on the planet. And isn’t it a constant refrain of law enforcement that they are “out-gunned” by criminals? How could that possibly be, if civilian small arms are “much less effective”?
Before you pontificate on the “effectiveness” of civilian small arms, I suggest you educate yourself on the types of small arms actually in the hands of civilians.
November 10, 2010, 1:12 amtomemos says:
Did you read the other quotes I gave above? The Jews “stupidly” turned in their guns. They “walked peacefully into the gas chambers.” You said that the Israelis would have gotten a significantly different outcome, en masse. And now you’re faulting us for being unable to even conceive of self-defense, in a thread about Jewish victims of the Holocaust turning in their guns. How am I supposed to read that.
“sorry you can’t read.”
Does it seem to anyone else that every day someone on the Internet has their first, marvelous discovery of sarcasm?
November 10, 2010, 1:14 amSarcastro says:
This is indeed how The Opposition thinks! They do not have good faith like normal, Real Americans.
November 10, 2010, 1:17 amRicardo says:
On the contrary, I have pointed out two cases in Nazi occupied Europe where resistance was extremely effective: Denmark and Belgium. In more modern times, we saw resistance to tyranny in the Philippines, Communist Eastern Europe and appartheid South Africa that was also extremely effective.
The problem is that these episodes do not fit the macho posturing narrative that so many here want to adopt. Armed resistance is not always the most effective way to resist tyranny — this is sometimes difficult for Americans to believe because America is almost the exception that proves the rule.
In Denmark, it was people like balding, paunchy civil servants and ordinary dockworkers who fought the Holocaust. That would never make a good Quentin Tarentino movie but it’s the absolute truth.
In short, the link between widespread gun ownership and resistance to tyranny is not at all well-established. A disarmed society can engage in extremely effective resistance while there are many armed societies that are hardly bastions of liberty.
November 10, 2010, 1:22 ammack says:
tomemos – please quote where I once stated that the victims of the holocaust were to blame. It is not blaming the victim of a crime to say that they may have survived or suffered less if they chose to resist that crime – that is what I stated nothing more or less in reference to the victims of the holocaust. The criminal who initiates a crime is responsible or to blame for that crime.
In reference to the individuals who post here and seem incapable of coming to terms with the idea, let alone the reality of armed resistance – that is a seperate issue – they are not victims of a crime like the holocaust – they are individuals who evidently choose to ignore the lessons of history. If they choose to do so – fine with me – but don’t attempt to use legislation and the force of government to impose your blindness on me.
And I am sincere in my concern about your ability to read.
November 10, 2010, 1:35 ammack says:
“Armed resistance is not always the most effective way to resist tyranny — this is sometimes difficult for Americans to believe because America is almost the exception that proves the rule.”
Really only in America has armed resistance been effective – remind me to tell Castro – and Simon Bolivar – and all those other historical rebels that armed resistance is futile and only works in America. And macho isn’t the word – the word is duty – as in: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
November 10, 2010, 1:41 amLarryA says:
1) Please cite positive uses of firearm registration in the few U.S. jurisdictions that actually register firearms.
2) What disadvantages do the majority of jurisdictions have, that don’t fool with registering firearms.
3) Explain how the D.C. and Chicago “registration” systems weren’t oppressive.
4) Explain why the highly discriminatory “discretionary” permit systems aren’t oppressive.
Show your work.
Correct in the U.S. perhaps. Jews in Israel have a different outlook.
“Straw purchase” involves buying a gun for a prohibited person from a dealer. It involves making false statements on the ATF Form 4473, and it’s illegal under federal law in all fifty states.
Our guns were supposed to be gone by now! Obama was not able to do what the fear-mongers claimed! (FTFY. There’s a difference.) Note that the Brady folks and the VPC were also predicting serious gun control, with glee.
Not quite true. The Chicago registration system was mainly used to keep people from owning guns. As in ”You can’t own a gun unless it’s registered, and we aren’t going to register any.”
See: French Resistance. For Jews, see the movie Defiance, a fact-based story of Jewish resistance in Poland.
Under federal law each FFL must keep a “bound volume” record of every firearm sale until he or she goes out of business. Is it your contention that the extra two copies are significant?
That wasn’t the argument that kept the President and anti-gun Democrats from passing gun control. The main problem they have is that a third of the Democrats in the present Congress were elected by pro-gun constituents, and are voting pro-gun.
November 10, 2010, 1:47 amRicardo says:
Um, mack, I was talking about resistance to tyranny so I have no idea what Fidel Castro is doing in that list. If you read what I wrote carefully, you would see I did not say that “only in America” is armed resistance effective. I merely pointed out that it often fails or leads to disastrous consequences (e.g. revolutionary France, Cuba, etc) and that successful cases are almost surely outnumbered by successful cases of unarmed revolts.
November 10, 2010, 1:49 amkazinski says:
If Nazi Germany was too far back and too horrific to use as an object lesson, what about Bosnia in the 90′s? Here you have another case where a disarmed civilian population in Europe were subjected to genocide.
Unlike resistance to the Nazi’s which would have been suicidal but rational, widespread civilian ownership of guns may well have saved thousands of lives. In Srebrenica alone over 8000 men and boys were rounded up and massacred in July of 1985. In a gun ownership society like the US where about on third of all households have guns it may have been much more difficult if not impossible to quietly round up the male population. Especially since once armed resistance started it may have given some backbone to the Dutch “peacekeepers” who cravenly stood by and let the massacre happen.
November 10, 2010, 1:52 ammack says:
Yes, Sarcastro – it is a sad thing to have had a gun control proponent tell you that they couldn’t bear to lower themselves to use violence to save their life or the lives of their children – and because of that they supported legislation that would legally require the state to use lethal force to enforce that decision on me and others who disagreed with them.
November 10, 2010, 1:54 amSarcastro says:
yes, mack. The only reason someone could possibly for any sort of gun control has got to be that they are fascistic in their pacifism. No other possible reasons exist, so we’d better assume that’s what people are talking about.
And Jews who don’t act Israeli are Jewing it wrong!
November 10, 2010, 2:06 amRicardo says:
Another point to make about a hypothetical armed Jewish resistance movement is to refer to the story in the above post — Mr. Flatow was a German Jewish army veteran who was sent to Theresienstadt. That is a crucial fact.
You might imagine that Jewish veterans would be the best people to lead an armed resistance but the fact is that the Germans attempted to co-opt the veteran community by offering them privileges not available to other Jews. They were initially exempted from some of the anti-Jewish laws and many lived under the illusion that they would be safer than others from the worst of anti-Semitism. Even when it came time for deportation, Theresienstadt was held up by the Nazis as being a better concentration camp than the others. This is where many military veterans and members of the Judenrat councils were sent. It was still a concentration camp but it wasn’t Auschwitz or the killing centers in the East where many ordinary German Jews were sent in the later round of deportations.
As in totalitarian societies everywhere, the Nazis followed a divide and conquer policy where they convinced key people that it would be better off submitting than resisting with the promise of preferential treatment (which was often a lie but was true enough time to be credible).
In short, most of the hypotheticals about armed resistance are pure 20/20 hindsight and Tarentino-esque fantasies.
November 10, 2010, 2:07 amFlooey says:
Earlier you denied that you were suggesting that German Jews could have followed the Danish non-violent resistance model, yet here you are again, in a thread about the disarming of Jews in Germany, saying a disarmed society can resist. How does this answer the question posed by the OP?
November 10, 2010, 2:11 ammack says:
Ricardo – it is not an either or proposition but a continuum – as in the old analogy of the four boxes of freedom – the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box. Resistance begins without violence or bloodshed – but at a certain point violence may become necessary. Therefore one of the lines in the sand is the disarming of the civilian population an attempt to take away the last resort for resisting tyranny.
Just as taking away the right of free speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press would be crossing a line in the sand – or taking away the right to vote – or taking away the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers – etc….
Should violent resistance become necessary that does not then automatically preclude non-violent resistance at the same time in certain situations. Curious how do you think the non-violent strategies would have fared in Nazi Germany over the long haul without the violent assault of the allies – given ten or twenty years of peace to consolidate their power and to ferret out the opponents to the final solution and to find those in hiding and to make well publicized examples of those that peacefully resisted or hid Jews – how well would that have worked?
November 10, 2010, 2:12 ammack says:
Sarcastro – I’ll take those that support it as such at their word – as far as the rational gun control advocates – I’m still waiting to hear from them – waiting to see the evidence that it works. Seems our own government couldn’t find the evidence that it works in their own report done under the Clinton administration. But I’ll wait – I’ll listen – but in the mean time could we agree to not pass anymore gun control laws and get rid of the one that haven’t been shown to work?
November 10, 2010, 2:24 ammack says:
“In short, most of the hypotheticals about armed resistance are pure 20/20 hindsight and Tarentino-esque fantasies.”
Well, you’ve convinced me – armed resistance has never worked anywhere in history – it is all a hollywood fantasy.
November 10, 2010, 2:28 amRicardo says:
Flooey, Jews were 0.6% of the German population and 0.2% of the Danish population. In neither instance did they make up a big portion of the overall society and in both cases any kind of resistance would have required the sympathy and assistance of the non-Jewish population. In Denmark, that assistance was forthcoming while in Germany, few people gave a damn.
Do you seriously think that the orderly Germans would have become more sympathetic to the Jews if they had started assassinating members of government and killing cops? Seriously? Doesn’t the example of Kristallnacht itself cut against such a fanciful notion? The many documented instances of torture and execution of family members and neighbors of those who did violently resist gives yet another reason why such armed resistance was not more common than it was.
November 10, 2010, 2:31 amRicardo says:
Again, you need to read what I actually write instead of simply making things up. It is without question that the Allied armies were crucial to the ultimate defeat of Nazism and almost certaintly invigorated the local resistance movements across Europe. But the point is that these were regular armies of democratic countries, not ragtag groups of civilians. In the later case, armed resistance often leads to either abject failure or being co-opted by sadists and psychopaths.
It is telling that the examples that come up here of “successful” armed revolts are Cuba under Castro, the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan and the Viet Cong. Seriously, you can’t do better than that?
November 10, 2010, 2:43 amSarcastro says:
[I actually agree with you as far as actual restrictions on conventional guns, mack. I've seen too many studies going both ways to believe guns correlate with violence in either direction. Plus there is an amendment.
I just understand that the proponents sincerely believe that fewer guns will decrease violence. Lots of city mayors seem to thinks so at least. I disagree, but I don't think they're doing so cause they are fascists.]
November 10, 2010, 2:46 amElemenope says:
That wasn’t the argument that kept the President and anti-gun Democrats from passing gun control. The main problem they have is that a third of the Democrats in the present Congress were elected by pro-gun constituents, and are voting pro-gun.
Of course not. I was addressing the premise of this absurd thread, not reality. I personally think that gun control is the single most politically stupid position democrats continue to take, and now that a good solid minority of them have cottoned to the stupidity, gun control is basically politically dead as an achievable goal.
Which is precisely what makes threads like this slide from absurd to farcical. Obama was never going to take anyone’s guns, it was never remotely within the realm of possibility; it belongs somewhere between resurrecting the fairness doctrine and death panels killing grandma among the real stinkers told on the right to perpetuate unthinking hysteria.
November 10, 2010, 3:20 amkazinski says:
Really? I don’t think they think of themselves as fascists, but what do you call people that want to control every detail of your life. They want to ban happy meals, outlaw smoking, restrict access to soft drinks or tax them prohibitively, decide what your children should be taught about sex and when, encourage them and allow them to get abortions without your permission, restrict your speech if it is “uncivil”, videotape your every move in public, license barbers, interior decorators, massage therapists and beauticians, and of course take your guns. Sure they think you’ll be better off that way, but it really is a fascist impulse.
November 10, 2010, 3:34 amRicardo says:
Well, I laughed out loud the first time I read Christopher Hitchens’ description of Mayor Bloomberg as “a picknose control freak.” I’m with Hitch on the law banning smoking in bars.
But fascist? Come on. Nothing undermines your ability to persuade people more than dropping the “F-bomb” on those who want to engage in the horrific and totalitarian practice of licensing barbers and massage therapists.
November 10, 2010, 3:49 amSarcastro says:
[Not everyone who wants to control guns is also a nanny state type.]
November 10, 2010, 4:19 amKirk Parker says:
Sarcastro,
You’re right–no need for fascism when idiocy will do the job.
November 10, 2010, 5:02 amBrett Bellmore says:
Well, yes, but the reason he was never going to take our guns away, was not because he wouldn’t *like* to take our guns away. It’s only because it’s politically infeasible for him to do so. And what makes it politically infeasible is that a substantial portion of the population takes the threat of having their guns taken away seriously enough to be single issue voters on the subject.
Democrats didn’t leap to the conclusion that the gun control cause was radioactive. They had to be dragged, screaming and kicking, to that conclusion, by one election after another where it hurt them, and hurt them bad. And it is not unreasonable to suppose that, if gun owners ever relax, Democrats, (And a certain faction of the GOP.) they’ll return to that cause.
Not unreasonable, because they’re still doing it to the extent they can. Blocking re-importation of old rifles. Maintaining anti-gun executive orders from previous administrations. Attempting international initiatives to curtail gun rights. Nominating, and confirming, judges and justices who’d razor blade the 2nd amendment out of the Constitution given just one more vote on the Supreme court.
The left’s war on gun ownership never ended, it was just forced into a somewhat covert mode. It will turn back into a hot war again, the moment they think their political survival doesn’t hinge on pretending they’ve surrendered.
November 10, 2010, 6:31 amPersonFromPorlock says:
Sigh. The usual plethora of commenters who, when they hear the word ‘pistol’, reach for their culture.
November 10, 2010, 6:45 amFluffyRoss says:
besides the above Volokhian article, a couple of additional readings and listenings: on bbcworldservice.co.uk, it’s “Heart and Soul” feature, and surprisingly not brewing their Islamo-love, Israel-hate palaver, was a wonderful long piece on Kaddish…in the U.K.: Nigella Lawson, Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, etc. If you’re observing Kaddish, there’s a soulful rendition that’s included, and certainly applicable for this evening.
also an inestimable new history: “Holocaust: the Nazi Persecution and Murder the Jews”, by Peter Longerich….the best of the bunch, replaces all the rest. There was a sterling review of this book in last week’s issue of the Chicago Jewish Star, by Prof. Arnold Ages. (it’s not online, unfortunately).
November 10, 2010, 7:35 amJoe Wilson says:
Symbolic (but deadly) resistance would have been better than none.
November 10, 2010, 7:45 amKerr says:
I’m for 2nd amendment rights but the silly Nazi idiocy in this post is offensive. It reeks of the miltary hatered found in the IBD blog about a possible miltary coup about a year ago. Irrational hatred born of apparently complete ignorance
Only someone completely ignorant of the US Military, it’s culture and it’s capabilities would think that the military could be used like the Nazi’s did or that thee firearms would do a damned bit of good if the miltary decided to do so. Either that or they watched “Red Dawn” too many times.
November 10, 2010, 7:46 amshagdrum says:
Tyrants. Fascism is one form of tyranny (which, like most, is rooted in the flawed conception of justice known as “social justice”). That flawed conception of justice necessitates collectivism, the destruction of the rule of law in favor of arbitrary power and ultimately tyranny.
November 10, 2010, 7:56 amGaryP says:
Just FYI. In Canada, citizens were assured that registration would NOT be followed by confiscation. However, over time, types of weapons that were legal at the time of registration have been declared illegal and registered owners have been forced to turn them in. Even guns that are legal to own are confiscated on any pretext (forget to renew registration, can’t fix that, gun confiscated).
Personally, I won’t apply for concealed carry just to stay below the radar. It means I can’t carry but really my guns are intended to defend my home. In public, I don’t think anyone can intervene with a gun to prevent crime, or even mass murder, without placing themselves in civil or criminal legal jeopardy (in this insane society) so my neighbors and I will just have to take our chances. Stupid, but as you can see from comments here we have descended to a society of immature idiots and there is no place for “reasonable” actions to defend yourself or your neighbors.
As to the government, I am with Mark Twain (or actually a certain Judge Tucker): “No Man’s life, liberty or property is safe while the legislature is in session.” That is a fact, not hyperbole.
November 10, 2010, 7:58 amAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
The issue is not “any regulation” but registration in particular. The state has no business registering either guns or printing presses. What part of “free people” do you not understand.
Since registration has large costs and vanishingly small benefits it is entirely reasonable to view registration as a first step to confiscation regardless of the politics of the confiscators.
November 10, 2010, 7:59 amKerr says:
You bunker up with all those weapons and the answer is reaaly simple, the military backs off then rolls up with a Abrams or even a Bradley and you die with no miltary casualties. Your arsenal would be impressive against cops against any modern militry it’s not impressive it’s just another just a form of suicide.
The most effective small arms are still only small arms and challenging a military force with only small arms is just stupid.
What makes you believe that the US Military or police are a likely to follow genocidal orders anyway? The training to disobey orders like that starts in basic training and continues throughout a military career. If there is a group of folks who respect the Constitution more as a culture that the US Military I would be amazed
November 10, 2010, 8:03 amCarl N. Brown says:
Quote: “”When the guy or gal in the ATF jacket shows up to seize your guns, or whatever, are you gonna shoot em?”"
People who like to ask that question of “gun nuts” ought to look at the judge’s description of the raid on Ken Ballew. Ballew was a military veteran who had five inert (legal) grenades as souvenirs. A police informant reported seeing grenades in his apartment. ATF checked the NFA registry and he had no registered live grenades. ATF conducted a knock-service day-time search by using a battering ram on the back door at 8:30pm at night. Gun control advocates who support their ATF responding vigorously to reports of illegal weapons apparently do not imagine themselves, or an innocent party, as the subject of a false report, or vigorous ATF action.
In my hometown 2004-2006 there were eight murders: five deaths were home or business intrusions by thugs seeking drugs or money to buy drugs. If my door is battered down after sundown, I am going to assume the most common case and respond accordingly.
Vic Oboyski representing 20,000 federal agents testified at the Waco hearings that the days of federal agents in suits politely knocking on a front door to hand deliver a search warrant were over: that the Waco raid was a harbinger of the future. Apparently some are happy with that as long as they imagine it is those other people who will be the target.
How will federal agents present a search and seizure warrant without a description “…particularly describing … the things to be seized…” in absence of federal registration? Well you could use the route in the Ballew raid: if possession is reported by an informant, but the registry shows none, you assume unregistered possession and raid. Or you go the route advocated by Norval Morris & Gordon Hawkins in “The Honest Politician’s Guide to Crime Control” (1970) and suspend the Fourth Amendment in regard to firearms? Even rabid anti-gunners balked at that: “I want the state to take away people’s guns. …. Since reprehensible police practices are probably required to make anti-gun laws effective, my proposal to ban all guns should probably be marked a failure before it is even tried.”–Aryeh Neier, former Executive Director of ACLU.
November 10, 2010, 8:06 amMithras says:
Every major urban police department in America today has helicopters, an APC or MRAP, concussion grenades, tear gas, and the most sophisticated thermal/IR/night vision technology available. The military has all that plus attack helicopters, fixed-wing gunships, and sniper rifles with exploding rounds that can hit targets a mile away. In addition, the police and military have advanced communication systems to coordinate their own operations while also having the ability to eavesdrop on and bug civilian communications. The military also now has lots of experience with urban warfare. The Nazis had none of these things.
I don’t care how many regular civilian weapons or even how many Class III weapons you own. I don’t care if you have military training. I don’t care if you and a hundred of your buddies all vow blood oaths to resist the oppressor and get the best tactical training you can find. I don’t care if you can assassinate individual cops and soldiers or employ hit-and-run tactics and blow up police stations. Unless an outside power is providing you with military-grade weapons and support and you have at least the tacit support of a large percentage of the population (see Iraq and Afghanistan), you’re dead. You’re probably dead even if you do, especially if the tyrannical government posited here isn’t constrained by the moral and legal obligations of the modern U.S. police and military forces. Imagining otherwise is a fantasy.
November 10, 2010, 8:07 amGaryP says:
Last thought. If the Jews had had personal weapons, they could not have revolted and prevented their families murder but they could have taken a few of the bastards with them. That is a poor substitute for successful self defense but any time you are presented with such a situation, it is better to die on your feet than to cower like a sheep and be murdered for your trouble. The difficulty is deciding when you are in such a situation but if you are a free person you have to make these decisions. The “sheep” don’t have to.
November 10, 2010, 8:07 amThey are comforted by repeating “the government would never hurt me for no reason.” After seeing the 100 million people murdered by Communists, the six million (plus) murdered by Fascists, the millions of Armenians murdered by Turks, Darfur, etc., etc., etc., I don’t see how anyone could hold on to that delusion but whatever gets you through the day, sheepie.
M. Simon says:
In the 50s when I was growing up firearms training (with BB guns) was very popular at our Jewish Community Center (Omaha). Lots of boys and a few girls. Now a days not so much.
November 10, 2010, 8:10 amAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
In addition you must be absolutely certain that no future government will ever become such. That degree of certainty about the future is a matter of faith rather than reason.
In 1914 Germany was the most cultured nation on the planet and had the highest rate of intermarriage among Jews and gentiles. Anyone would have been considered a nut case that predicted that in less than 30 years Germany would be fighting a war against the US, France, USSR, the UK, et al while at the same time pulling Jews out of the army and industry to murder them.
November 10, 2010, 8:12 amM. Simon says:
Fortunately we have the drug law exception to the 4th.
November 10, 2010, 8:15 amM. Simon says:
Harder to do if the military has to watch their backs. And has difficulty maintaining their supply lines. Yeah. The folks in the bunker are toast. But the military will pay a price.
You are thinking isolated incidents. General war is different. Quantity has a quality all its own.
November 10, 2010, 8:26 amMarian Kechlibar says:
Mithras: Assuming that a part of the military defected to the insurgents (which is likely in such case…)… and taking into account that most of the sophisticated equipment of modern police and military needs significant supply chain to keep going … I am not that sure that even a large force such as the US military would be able to extinguish such insurgency quickly.
The military defectors would provide quite a lot of know-how and the ordinary insurgents the intelligence (“eyes everywhere”) plus firepower (they are already used to guns). With this combination, they could probably conquer some extra ammunition and weapon depots to get a few nice things like Stingers.
Urban insurgency in a city like Los Angeles wouldn’t be much better than Baghdad. 100 000+ soldiers to keep peace, plus a lot of materiel.
November 10, 2010, 8:30 amBrett Bellmore says:
The fact that the police are more heavily armed than most private citizens is irrelevant to whether private arms could successfully be used to oppose the police in the event of a descent into tyranny. Do the police live in their police stations? Do they travel in armed groups, 24/7?
Agreed, anyone who thinks they can hole up, and hold off the government, is an idiot begging to be made an example of. Make yourself a stationary, identifiable target, and the government will deploy whatever resources it needs to in order to make you visibly lose. But that’s hardly the only approach to using private arms to oppose government tyranny.
November 10, 2010, 8:31 amshagdrumshagdrum says:
How about basing your argument on what “their” philosophical/ideological worldview is? Is that too “subjective” for you?
November 10, 2010, 8:33 amM. Simon says:
I dunno. I’m ex-military (admittedly a Navy pussy – but we hang out with Marines) and a Jew. And I think about these things. Are they serious worries? Not yet. Hopefully not ever.
But just in case I hang out from time to time at the Oath Keepers site.
November 10, 2010, 8:33 amAbdul Abulbul Amir says:
But there is an additional constraint in the political downside of gun battles with otherwise nonviolent civilians. Witness Ruby Ridge. A future government may be amoral but it will never be apolitical.
November 10, 2010, 8:37 amTertium Quid says:
Armed citizens often blunt the power of central governments. England’s liberties have as much to do with the King’s need for masses of long bowmen as with the Magna Carta. Armed citizens don’t depend utterly on the government to defend themselves. That’s a good thing.
November 10, 2010, 8:37 amBohemond says:
Lies, damned lies and statistics. Yes, the gun-control people spreading love this one around, while (deceptively, and intentionally so) never giving any context. “[A]nd traced back to the United States” is the key phrase here: it tries dishonestly to equivocate one set (all guns used in crime in Mexico) with a subset (those guns traced back to the US- meaning only those guns which the Mexican government requested BATF to trace, because they had NFA-compliant serial numbers and were therefore presumed to be of US origin – only about 20% of the total).
When we apply the correct set as the denominator, your 40% shrivels to a mere 8%. The Brady Bunch have succeeded in proving merely that “the majority of guns that came from the US, came from the US.” The bulk of the narco-gangs’ weapons never came from the US; they come up from Central and South America, and more generally from the international black market (some, interestingly enough, with Cuban and Venezuelan army markings). The largest single source, though, and for military-grade stuff, is weapons sold out the back door by the insanely corrupt Mexican army and police. We’re talking full-auto AK-47′s and M-16′s here, along with submachine guns, heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, claymore mines, RPG’s… and you can’t buy those at Wal-Mart. Not even in Texas.
November 10, 2010, 8:39 amKatahdin says:
Doesn’t that depend on the tyrant? When the tyrant is restrained, either by morals or fear of publicity, then non violence is the right answer. Examples would be civil rights in the U.S., Ghandi, the Shah, and so on. I’d guess that if the Palestinians had adopted Ghandian tactics they’d have a country by now. OTOH, if the tyrant feels no restraint (Pol Pot, Hitler in the Balkans, …), then all that non violent protests are going to do is make it easier for the tyrant to round up opponents.
You keep mentioning Denmark, but even the Nazis felt some small amount of restraint in Denmark (for PR reasons, they wanted it to be an example of a model protectorate). King Christain X, for example, seems to have made a policy of deliberately snubbing the Germans. I don’t think that would have worked out so well for, say, an equivalent leader of a Slavic country.
There is a fairly large branch of the military – Army Special Forces – whose very raison d’etre stands in disagreement. Their fundamental mission for the last 50 years has been to support resistance groups, which implies that they disagree with your estimate of the potential effectiveness of such efforts.
In any event, as others have pointed out, if you are at the point of being put in the cattle car, whether or not resistance is futile is beside the point. ‘At least I’ll try to take one of the ******* with me’ may not be everyone’s philosphy, but I don’t think it’s any less rational than meekly submitting.
November 10, 2010, 8:41 amGaston says:
Let’s look at the logic here. If I register my guns then I self identify as a gun owner, but if I don’t register my guns then I have broken a Law. At the same time the Government now has a list of gun owners. The Government has simultaneously criminalized the ownership of a firearm that has not been registered. To a person already living an outlaw lifestyle a new law requiring registration is meaningless. An outlaw would just ignore such a law. Innocent people that have forgotten about Grandpa’s war trophy in the attic are now criminals.
If the No Fly list is a guide, then we know how well the Government will maintain a list of gun owners. Without any legal adjudication or recourse through the legal system, the government will start making decisions about the people that have registered guns. This could be anything, from a “special” tax to help pay for maintaining this government registry to adding the names of gun owners to the TSA “special” screening process.
More likely are the personal abuses of Government employees. Here I cite the example of the State Department contractors that would peruse the Visa habits of famous people, the multiple cases of IRS employees that look up other peoples tax records to satisfy their own curiosity, and the California police officer that was convicted of going into DMV licensing databases and in return for money was selling the information to debt collection agencies. Do not forget the stalkers that have used Freedom of Information Act requests to get the home addresses of battered women from queries to State carry permit databases.
The Soviet Union was more intelligent in their oppression. They attempted to control every typewriter and copier machine in the Country. They realize that it is better to criminalize the non-Governmental dissemination of information than to criminalize the ownership of a tool that can be made at a bench in a workshop.
As far as the argument that it could never happen here, the Millgram experiment (and various other supporting studies) show that “just following orders” is ingrained into the human psyche. One guard with a rifle on a platform as hundreds climbed into cattle cars to a death camp. Administrating electrical shocks that cause obvious pain. Right now there are FISA court secret wiretaps, non-judicial indefinite detention, and illegal arrests for taking photographs of Public buildings from Public sidewalks. Just because this has not happened to you personally or to someone that you know, does not mean that every day that there is an incident where the Constitutional Rights of a Citizen and Taxpayer are being willfully violated by people sworn “…to protect the Constitution…”
Whenever I see these debates I am reminded of Pastor Martin Niemöller (go ahead Google his famous quotation) and the also famous quotation of Edmund Burke (go ahead “all it takes is for good men”). Society must accept that people must be allowed to flourish based upon individual self interest. I see absolutely no benefit to myself as an individual in the registration of firearms. I also see no benefit to the “greater good” of inflicting further bureaucracy on other law abiding citizens. Balanced with this is the compelling sense that we are already partially down the slippery slope.
I subscribe to the philosophy that the Government is the last resort. If we are asking the Government to register firearms than we as a people have failed at so many other levels.
November 10, 2010, 8:43 amGunga says:
@ Kerr – What makes me believe that the US Military or Police are likely to follow genocidal orders?
Keep telling yourself it’s the best of all possible worlds, Candide. Aren’t you the guy standing in Tiananmen Square in 1989 that said, “The People’s Army will never attack the people?” Or are you even old enough to remember that? Think what you want about Kent State, but it did prove that the military can be provoked to shoot and kill the citizenry. I think ANY book on the Civil Rights movement would disabuse you of the notion that the police are above fascistic impulses.
November 10, 2010, 8:49 amFlatlander says:
I am a new firearms owner, and I was dumbfounded that the Federal firearm registration papers I had to fill out at purchase required even my race. I found this to be a chilling demand by the government, and wonder what credible need they have for this type of demographic information? Are they taking a survey of firearms owners and sportsmen by race, or do they want to know they have the right person when they come for my guns? I left it blank and was told I had to check the box or I wouldn’t get my .22LR pistol. Next time, I’ll fill out something besides my actual appearance.
Anyone who trusts the government with this information is stupid or very naive.
November 10, 2010, 8:49 amMithras says:
Marian- if the rebel military units have the sophisticated arms in this scenario, then why do the civilians also need less sophisticated arms?
Abdul Abulbul Amir – If you posit that a large percentage of the population (especially if it’s a majority) would oppose the tyrannical government, then I think you’ve assumed away the problem. A tyrant who is opposed by a majority of the people will always lose in the end. That wasn’t the case in Nazi Germany.
November 10, 2010, 8:53 amKerr says:
And the number of civilians with the skills necessary to make the Military pay any significant price is vanishingly small. The number whom would continue to do so when it is shown that it’s simply another means of suicide is even smaller
You still haven’t explained why you think the US Military is a threat to Democracy
November 10, 2010, 9:10 amKatahdin says:
Yes. But if he (and his security forces) have a monopoly of force, that end will be longer in coming than if force is more democratically distributed.
November 10, 2010, 9:10 amCarl N. Brown says:
Quote: “”…pulling Jews out of the army…”"
When the Nazis ordered Jewish officers pulled out of the Kriegsmarine, the older Reichsmarine veteran officers often refused to turn them over, making the Kriegsmarine Hitler’s least favorite of the armed forces. When the archbishop publicly denounced the euthanasia of institutionalised Germans as “useless feeders”, at least temporarily the Nazis backed off. It is not beyond possibility that a little more resistance to the Nazis, both nonviolent and violent, might have changed the history of the world. The Nazis at times acted like the type of bully who would back off if his nose was bloodied but who would react to submission by becoming more brutal.
November 10, 2010, 9:11 amM. Simon says:
It helps.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
November 10, 2010, 9:12 amRicardo says:
In fairness, it wasn’t the German Army which implemented the Holocaust, either. It was the SS who were essentially the private security force of the National Socialist Party and who swore an oath of loyalty to Hitler personally, not to Deutschland.
There was always some honor left in the Wehrmacht. Just not nearly enough as they did cooperate with and participated in the rounding up of Jews on the Eastern Front and engaged in vicious and cowardly attacks on civilians. Hitler always doubted their loyalty enough that the most important work of the Holocaust was left to the SS, though.
November 10, 2010, 9:14 amWeary G says:
I see a lot of self-righteous hyperventilating here by some criticizing the post, some silly.
First, the post is not criticizing Holocaust victims. It postulates what resistance to gun registration MIGHT have done to alter the tide of history. Even if it had been little, would it have not been better fighting the fight in 32 while armed against the embryo of the rising fascism, than to do so in 1938 when the Nazi’s were considerably stronger?
Is it wrong to even ask the question? Please…
Second, pointing out that gun registration greatly assisted confiscation, and confiscation made oppression and genocide easier, nomatter the degree, does not equal a “gun registration advocate” = “Nazi” argument. Nowhere does this post do this. It simply posits how registration was used by one totalitarian regime to assist its campaign of genocide. If that ALSO tends to support the idea of non-registration over registration, welk, sorry if facts and logic offend some. I sense the offense is feigned, however, to avoid having to make the conclusions.
What are the facts?
1) Most Germans, even Nazis, would have preferred not to be shot, crippled or killed, no matter their hatred of Jews or beliefs in the Fatherland
2) Depriving the victims of your calculated and systemic genocide of the means of defending themselves makes #1 less likely
3) NOT depriving them of the means to defend themselves, and not even knowing the potential danger of any particular victim (armed? not-armed?) makes #1 MUCH MORE likely, and thus the persecution and rounding up of Jews much more dangerous.
4) Running pitched battles in the streets between armed Jews and brown-shirts in which hundreds or thousands died, even if the Jews had the worst of it, would be something that would have complicated the Third Reich’s plans, both domestically and on the world stage. Death camps in Poland could be hidden. Civil war in Berlin, not so much.
5) Morale counts a lot in armed struggles. Brown shirts being able to run ramshod over Jews I would offer encouraged such behavior; fed it. Going out and seeing your friend’s heads blown off pretty regularly might have tempered that a bit. It might have also encouraged others in resistance to the regime.
6) Jews were only about 500,000 strong in Germany pre-war, compared to 67 million, a low ratio, but let’s assume that 1/4 of them were armed and willing to fight, even in small skirmishes. Can anyone seriously say that 125,000 armed resisters in Germany in 1938 would NOT have had a serious affect on history?
Let’s assume, though, for a second, that in the end, armed Jews in Germany could have done little to change that history. Would it still not have been better being able to fight and die in the streets than being shot or gassed later in a death camp?
The Jews did not have the choice for many reasons, but one was being disarmed.
November 10, 2010, 9:14 amKerr says:
The only folk who are talking revolution and insurgency in the US now are unlikely to get much support in LA or any major city. The military is unlikly top support some paranoid miltias in any appreciable numbers.
The threat of the Miltary or the government coming to take your guns by force is about as realistic as Me being attacked by a grizzly bear here in Delaware
November 10, 2010, 9:18 amKerr says:
I know the US miltary and it’s culture,. My judgment is from knowledge not from paranoia. The regional differences that the Chinese used to get troops who would attack the students at Tianemen, they had to bring in troops for a different region, are not present in the US miltary and havn’t been for weell over a century.
The Chinese army is also not taught routinely and repetitively that unlawful orders must not be obeyed unlike the US Military
A much more problem result is that the miltary would do what they did in Russian when the communists tried to take back power from Yetsin and mixture of Standing aside and backing.
November 10, 2010, 9:26 amBFA says:
The study quoted is classic “how to lie with statistics” and is based on misleading and some outright false data.
The organization that published the report is a die hard antigun group funded by the Mayor of New York that is known to use false and misleading data to support its agenda and the use of their material adds no value to any reasonable argument.
Facts:
Most guns used in crimes in Mexico that are recovered cannot be traced.
Most guns used in crimes in Mexico are never recovered.
Of the guns that can be traced, most are from the U.S. because we are their next-door neighbor, what else would you expect? We keep better records than they do.
The data in the study does not show how many of the guns recovered were stolen from their lawful owner in the U. S. and then taken to Mexico.
The study does not differentiate between types of crimes that guns were recovered from. Gun laws in Mexico are not the same as the U. S. and what might be a crime in Mexico is simple ownership or lawful possession in the U. S.
The numbers do not reflect actual violent crime. For example if you are charged with not having a valid driver’s license and they confiscate your hunting rifle that was properly stored in the trunk, it is listed a gun recovered.
Mexico is a nation of over 100 million people. In 2009 Mexico recovered 5,194 guns that could be traced to the U. S. 5,194 guns recovered is not even close to an epidemic or even a blip on most people’s radar screen. In 2009 in Texas alone the ATF reports that there were over 16,000 guns recovered. In California, the ATF reports over 32,000 guns recovered during the same period.
There is a much more significant correlation between the number of guns recovered in Mexico from Texas and California to the size and topography of the borders in California and Texas than there is between the gun purchasing laws in Texas and California.
I could go on and on, but I think my point is made.
November 10, 2010, 9:29 amlgm says:
Let me add my voice to those who say this post is revolting. Maybe one should remind the author that the NAZIs also believed in a strong military and “peace through strength”, shades of Reagan. Just saying.
November 10, 2010, 9:29 amronnor says:
The Communists have the same type of laws, no guns in the hands of its citizens, only authorized types; police etc. Communists have murdered over 200 million on their own citizens, the Nazi aren’t even in their league. If you [an American] get caught with a regime changer like a .45 your incarcerated for a minimum of 10 years but if you are a ‘citizen’ of China your body parts will soon be for sale in the medical market.
November 10, 2010, 9:31 amKevin R.C. O'Brien says:
Mithras:
A reasonable position. But is it really stupid, though? Who’s the most prominent American still pushing gun restrictions? The very authoritarian Mike Bloomberg.
I guess it comes down to whether you think of Nazis more as men who lust for power, and would rule by fiat if they could (which Bloomberg clearly is) or as men who want to exterminate Jews (which Bloomberg clearly is not).
Most of the gun “control” proponents are similar to Bloomberg in this. Most of them stop short of wanting to exterminate their opposition, but resent the existence of such, vilify it as evil, and would steamroll it if they could. It’s not the guns, it’s the control.
Hollywood notwithstanding, monsters like Hitler and Stalin didn’t think they were monsters and comport themselves like cartoon villains. They thought they were building a better society, and glistening-eyed believers follow every one that arises. Yet none of these guys in all recorded history has actually produced a better society. Funny, that.
November 10, 2010, 9:34 amMark Websterq says:
Ahhhh! So you are betting on the future despot being on your side.
November 10, 2010, 9:34 amRicardo says:
Which still directly contradicts your statement about non-violence not working against a foe like Hitler. Sure, there were other factors at work but the above post was about an actual historical example in the real world, not about a hypothetical boogeyman. Resistance to the Holocaust in Belgium and even the Netherlands and Italy also made it very difficult for the Nazis to deport Jews.
Moreover, if we are going to shift the discussion to Slavic countries we would have to start with the question of whether or not local ownership of firearms by anybody could have made a significant difference on the Eastern Front. Surely, once an area is invaded and under martial law, disarming the population is a foregone conclusion. The Nazis employed sadists and psychopaths for the purpose of torturing and murdering civilians in reprisals for any partisan activity. Moreover, the simple fact is that the Nazis were experts in finding collaborators and were pretty good in practice in co-opting those who would otherwise oppose them, especially in the East. You would like to assume that those hypothetical people with guns in Eastern Europe would have been anti-Nazi — that’s not a safe assumption.
November 10, 2010, 9:35 amKevin R.C. O'Brien says:
An excellent book (in an absolutely creepy way) is The Einsatzgruppen Reports, published by Yad Vashem. It contains the actual after-action reports from the Nazi units charged with extermination of Jews in the captured Polish and Soviet eastern territories. Before extermination camps, the Nazis did this direct approach of cordoning off a town, rounding up the Jews, and shooting them. All.
Some of you have read of this, either in history books or the novel Babi Yar, for instance. (Babi Yar was a real place, and the massacre there was a real thing, repeated in the hundreds and thousands across the steppes).
One thread running through these reports is the unhappiness and inconvenience caused to the Einsatzgruppen by individual and small-group armed resisters, specifically Jewish resisters. Sometimes the forces of history are such that survival of the individual is not in the cards. The Hobson’s Choice left to the individual is: to go placidly to doom, or to make one’s best effort to be a bone in the predator’s throat.
Of course, the predators and their enablers would like to deprive the individual of the means to make even that choice.
November 10, 2010, 9:43 amGeoff says:
Like when liberals leave places they’ve ruined, like California, and move to other places which actually have jobs?
November 10, 2010, 9:45 amCarl N. Brown says:
What makes me believe that the US Military or Police are less likely to follow genocidal orders:
o the Special Forces underground and resistance in response to requests made at Ft. Hood by ATF for Waco;
o Thomas R. Lujan, “Legal Aspects of Domestic Employment of the Army”, Parameters US Army War College Quarterly, Autumn 1997, Vol. XXVII, No. 3. http://www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/Articles/97autumn/lujan.htm;
o the fact Hugh Thompson got the Soldier’s Medal for curtailing William Calley’s orders at MyLai village;
o the Oath Keepers movement.
The course on Uniform Code of Military Justice emphasizes the idea that there is a duty to question unlawful or unwise orders, even if it meant the end of one’s military career. My brother-in-law’s unit in VietNam refused to follow a green officer’s order to march into a certain ambush: my wife, sister-in-law and I watched national TV news coverage of the mutiny. In the end, the officer was disciplined.
November 10, 2010, 9:45 amRicardo says:
China is another good counter-example. At first, it seems to make the clearest possible case for the futility of non-violent resistance. Tienanmen was, after all, a horrible defeat for democratic forces.
But before you decide that what China needs is a good solid armed revolt by the citizens, I would advise you to read up on 19th century Chinese history first. Remember all those Chinese immigrants who came to California in the 1850s and 60s? They weren’t just running from poverty.
November 10, 2010, 9:49 amKatahdin says:
Me too (army brat, friends in the military. Would have served myself if I could pass the physical). But I think your point – that the U.S. military is inculcated to ‘Don’t be Evil’ – is true today. How confident are you that the same will be true in a century or five? The Roman army, for example, changed quite a bit over a few centuries, from a citizen army loyal to the populace at large, to a mercenary organization loyal to their general. You have a balance of powers not because you think the current congress/president/judiciary is evil, but because you expect that there will eventually be an evil congress or president or judiciary.
I’m not following. The invader is certainly going to try, but may not completely succeed. There were partisans in most of occupied Europe to at least some degree. Some were pretty effective – Yugoslavia was rather like Vietnam; the Germans could go where they wished, but they effectively controlled only the ground they were standing on. Spain in the Peninsular War is another example – the French couldn’t safely travel in units smaller than dozens to hundreds.
The notion that organized armies can walk over ragtag guerrilla movements just isn’t born out by experience. Sometimes they can, sometimes they can’t. This is a fairly well studied corner of military history, e.g. Robert Asprey’s ‘War in the Shadows’.
November 10, 2010, 9:59 amGonzoMorpha says:
No, bill… its not meaningless unless you can posit with high certainty that the government has no possibility of becoming controlled not merely by Nazis, but by any ideological movement that would subjugate a portion of the population in the manner of the Nazis.
These tiresome “are you calling me a Nazi? ZOMGWTFBBQ!” over-reactions would seem at least worth debating if gun registration had actually ever accomplished any laudable positive benefits in terms of safety, crime or whatever in the normative case. Since the laws do not, its hard to understand the kvetching of people like bill.
The cynical would be tempted to look at the oversimplification (i.e., forgetting that governments can be as bad or worse than Nazi’s without being, you know, Nazi’s) with a jaded eye and wonder if this is a case of “the gentleman doth protest too much.” I posit that people like bill actually support one of the “bad” (but less bad than Nazi) improper uses of gun registration: Disarming of political opponents so that redistributive, confiscatory, and other highly unpopular policies can be enacted without worry of messy resistance by the peasants.
November 10, 2010, 10:01 amsardonic_sob says:
I cannot speak to the motivations of others, but my comment was not meant as an insult to Mr. Flatlow or the victims of the Holocaust. Nor, in fact, was it meant as an insult to anyone. If you took it as an insult, it is because you disagree with my politics but agree with my morals. You’ll have to deal with your own self-contradictions.
November 10, 2010, 10:02 amJohn Hamilton says:
Without commenting on the validity of this particular article, I submit that there is danger in letting the government effectively control all firearms.
November 10, 2010, 10:06 am.
I’m not talking about Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or anybody in particular. We don’t know when or in what political disguise an evil dictator or evil party will rise to power. The danger is in letting ANYBODY
ArchitectJS says:
At that point you are a felon because you lied on the federal form.
I guess that’s one of the points of the OP
November 10, 2010, 10:10 amCro says:
I am somewhat surprised at the seemingly willful ignorance of the posters on here with a liberal bent.
Registration makes confiscation easily achievable; Not inevitable but achievable. An armed populace will not necessarily rise up against an oppressive regime, but it certainly presents the possibility of armed opposition, therefor any despot that might consider using oppressive measures against the citizenry needs to take that into account.
An absence of gun registration in Germany and in other European nations would not have made the mass killings by the Nazis impossible, but it would have made it much more difficult to achieve, simply because it would have resulted in populace that would have been much harder to ensure that was unarmed.
The Germans depended on the civilians NOT resisting. If the civilians had resisted en masse (not 100%) but even 20% then likely the execution of the Holocaust would likely not have occurred.
November 10, 2010, 10:11 amJohn Hamilton says:
Without commenting on the validity of this particular article, I submit that there is danger in letting the government effectively control all firearms.
November 10, 2010, 10:11 am.
I’m not talking about Barack Obama, George W. Bush, or anybody in particular. We don’t know when or in what political disguise an evil dictator or evil party will rise to power. The danger is in letting ANYBODY have too much power.
.
Certainly, there are good reasons for gun registration (to track murderers), but there are some pretty good reasons to not have gun registration as well (to allow the citizenry a fighting chance against a tyrannical government (from whatever apparent point on the political spectrum).
.
And yeah, if they ever came after me and mine, even if there was ultimately a Holocaust-like mass murder, I would want at least a fighting chance to take a couple of the bastards with me.
.
IT CAN HAPPEN HERE. America is a very special place, but only so long as we keep it that way.
John Hamilton says:
Sorry for the multiple postings.
November 10, 2010, 10:13 amMike Constitution says:
According to the US census there are 114,825,428 households. Recent data show about half of all households have at least one gun with the average being about five.
This power is indeed one of the things that guarantees liberty and keeps our government in check. Our unalienable rights are protected from the brute force of government by our Constitution and the 2nd Amendment is an important tool in that defense of our liberty.
The comments here show that many of you do not understand the power we citizenry yield but at least one man did: “You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass.” – Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
Read a bit about the Warsaw Uprising and then tell me things would not have been different if that sort of thing had occurred throughout the territories occupied by the Nazis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Uprising
November 10, 2010, 10:14 amKevin R.C. O'Brien says:
Didn’t read Halbrook’s article, did you?
November 10, 2010, 10:16 amRicardo says:
I don’t too much about the Yugoslav experience overall to comment but the Final Solution was certainly implemented in Ustashe-led Croatia and included Serbs as well as Jews. It’s not clear to me whether the Yugoslav resistance was the result of ordinary people owning guns or not. In any case, the ultimate outcome was hardly the establishment of a free and democratic nation which is the other point I’ve been making. It is the very nature of armed resistance movements that they frequently get taken over by crooks and thugs.
I never said that armed resistance by a civilian population would always and everywhere fail. It’s just that it often does seem to fail in the sense of leading to a genuine improvement. Guns are far from a “bulwark against tyranny.”
November 10, 2010, 10:18 amRicardo says:
No dice: there is no evidence that Yamamoto ever said this.
It’s silly anyway. Whatever fantasies the Japanese might have had of invading the mainland U.S. — leaving aside the enormous logistical hurdles — those would have been quickly crushed following the Battle of Midway.
November 10, 2010, 10:24 amBartholomew Roberts says:
On the issue of holocausts and gun control, Daniel Polsby and Don Kates have written an excellent article on the subject in the 1997 Washington University Law journal. You can find it online here.
November 10, 2010, 10:27 ambuddy larsen says:
To the supercilious remarks up top about cigarets and railroads and so force standing as critiques of the idea that a German citizenry endowed with a 2nd Amendment might have spared the globe of WWII: folks resisting someone kicking in the front door can’t make use of cigarets and/or railroads with anywhere near the proximate efficiency provided by guns.
November 10, 2010, 10:28 amChrisTS says:
OOPS! Too much fury, too little attention to the keyboard. Xenophobia. (Jeesh, I almost just did it again; bad fingers, bad!) And, yes, I think Zeno is/was a pain.
November 10, 2010, 10:29 amFormer E-5 says:
In response to:
Ricardo says:
Moreover, if we are going to shift the discussion to Slavic countries we would have to start with the question of whether or not local ownership of firearms by anybody could have made a significant difference on the Eastern Front
Try a Slavic country called Yugoslavia. Without significant outside aid and while fighting a civil war between the Chetniks and the Partisans they managed to keep about 20 Axis divisions occupied. 20 divisions is on the order of the number engaged in Italy against the British and Americans. This in an area roughly the size of Lousianna and Arkansas combined. An active, armed population can make a significant difference.
November 10, 2010, 10:30 amKevin R.C. O'Brien says:
This appears to be the same law review article, made accessible to a prof’s students, and indicentally accessible to the public:
http://www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/handwerker/309readings/Polsby,%20Kates%201997%20Washington%20University%20Law%20Quarterly_%20OF%20HOLOCAUSTS%20AND%20GUN%20CO…pdf
Last comment… work calls.
November 10, 2010, 10:45 ambuddy larsen says:
“Partisan” attacks on Hitler’s supply lines as much as anything else saved Stalin in 1941-43. 6th Army’s surrender at Stalingrad –universally agreed to’ve turned the war –was due to supply problems enormously aggravated by the lightly-armed civilian “partisans”.
November 10, 2010, 10:49 amsardonic_sob says:
You’re complaining that he can’t do better than revolts which defeated the most powerful militaries in history with small-arms and bloody-mindedness?
Man, remind me never to enter any hurdle events in YOUR track meets. Sheesh.
November 10, 2010, 10:49 amKatahdin says:
Sure, no one sane is saying that lotsa guns==paradise on earth. Just look at Somalia, or Yugoslavia after the breakup or what have you. But Mao famously said ‘power grows out of the barrel of a gun’. Allowing relatively widespread civilian ownership of those guns is ultimately about the democratization of that power. Nothing says that democracies can’t be bad (Jim Crow) or go bad (French revolution, bolshevik takeover in Russia), but ultimately favoring democracy means accepting the assumption that the wisdom of the crowd is better, on the average, than the wisdom of some chosen (or self chosen) few. That’s true whether you are talking about distributing power peacefully via voting or, in extremis, violently by armed conflict.
The modern American model is, IMHE, not the optimal way to prevent tyranny, but it’s better than the model of disarming the populace and hoping for the best. (FWIW, I think the best model is the Swiss one. No arguments there about whether the populace at large can resist a military coup. But that comes at the price of universal service.)
November 10, 2010, 10:49 amG.R. Mead says:
No, I am afraid the math is against them in a deep, deep way. First The TOTAL military manpower complement of the United States including all reserves and National Guard and including Navy and Coast Guard is only 2.3 million. And only a 1/3 of the actual ARMY is combat arms. Even if you add in all of the police officers of every jurisdiction in the country, that only adds about another 1.7 million, (based on 4-5 police per 1000 population (LAPD & NYPD ratios). So max internal suppression complement — without regard to combat proficiency — is only about 4 million, in a nation of 300 million.
Conversely, there are well over 20 million veterans in civilian life of age to handle weapons in opposition if so motivated. That is a ten to one advantage in comparable manpower complement. And there are more than ten times the number of firearms in civilian possession necessary to outfit that irregular contingent with a weapon apiece. Reloading is ubiquitous, and smokeless powder is 150 year old technology that a high school chemist can do in her kitchen or garage. Did I mention fertilizer or the average grocery cleaning aisle?
And those numbers assume that all the military will join in a suppression internally, regardless of the supposed justification — which is not likely and huge numbers of declared an undeclared defectors will vastly complicate suppression policy and the actual percentage of defectors is certainly not a foregone conclusion for strategic planning purposes of the would-be dictatorial regime. For reference sake, the number of US troops in Afghanistan in May of this year was 94,000 in a nation of 28 million or about 3.3 soldiers per 1000 population, most of whom are combat arms.
To compare, while the 4/300 million sounds larger being about 1.3 per 100, the true combat personnel ratio is about a 1/3 of that or equivalent to the LAPD or NYPD police presence ratio at 4.4 per 1000. If only a third of those with combat proficiency defect (a reasonable likelihood, if you know the culture of security personnel), then the ratio is somewhat over 1 per 1000, and civilian veterans of 20 million opposing 4 million in security manpower would have not a 5-1 advantage but about a 200-1 advantage.
In short, because of broad military experience and the availability of civilian arms, this country is UNGOVERNABLE by force — and was meant to remain that way. The fact that our country operates tolerably well in this condition of practical inability to dictate policy by force, actually rebuts, empirically, the “monopoly of force” theory of the state, FWIW, and on which most gun control policies are implicitly based.
November 10, 2010, 10:50 amByomtov says:
Clayton Cramer,
But eventually, the costs in terms of dead Nazis would have made this task not simply disagreeable (as it was to many German soldiers assigned to Einsatzgruppen duty), but downright dangerous.
They found it “disagreeable?” Oh dear. How terrible for them First of all many of the members of the Einsatzgruppen were volunteers, or SS volunteers. Hard to feel much sympathy for them.
Second, more broadly, as has been pointed out to you above, those who found it disagreeable faced minor negative consequences, at most, for refusal to participate. So, while it’s a side issue here, let’s not let murderers off the hook please.
November 10, 2010, 10:57 amFormer Army MP says:
I know it has been mentioned here in the thread before, the 43 Warsaw Uprising. I am bringing it up again because it shows that pistols work, even against a throughly evil government with very well trained NCOS.
November 10, 2010, 10:59 am800 mostly jews mostly untrained as soldiers–and mostly armed WITH PISTOLS–held off 5 battalions of SS Panzergrenadiers reinforced to regimental size.
And held them off for A MONTH.
That is shocking.
M. Simon says:
Does not make it any less true.
Just like Washington never said this:
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”
November 10, 2010, 11:03 amG.R. Mead says:
Math check. 2 hundreths is NOT 200 to 1 but 50 to 1 . Duh.
November 10, 2010, 11:05 amBohemond says:
Oh, dear. Batista’s comic-opera army “one of the world’s most powerful militaries?” In fact, they usually surrendered without a fight; most of Castro’s “heroic battles” were sheer fabrications.
As to the Viet Cong- the principal enemy at all times in Viet Nam was the PAVN, the North Vietnamese Regular Army- with its tanks and artillery and MiGs and so on. The VC certainly gave us problems- but they blew their wad during Tet and got annihilated. And where the VC were effective, it was less through small-arms than through mortars and machine guns. By ’71 the Cong were a nuisance force (I know that to a guy they ambushed it wasn’t a ‘nuisance’- but, strategically they were.
The Muj in Afghanistan are a bit closer- but then, it’s hard to find, in all the annals of military stupidity, a campaign conducted as stupidly as the Red Army’s in Afghanistan.
November 10, 2010, 11:09 amG.R. Mead says:
Math check: Two hundreths is NOT
200-1but is still a formidable 50-1 civilian advantage …Stoopid maths.
November 10, 2010, 11:17 amAndrew J. Lazarus says:
That would be about 30x the Jewish population of Germany, including children. Oops.
These claims are rather weird. The Holocaust took place despite the fact that the Armed Forces of Poland, the USSR, etc. resisted. Somehow if we add in a few (more) francs-tireurs Hitler packs up and goes home? No one has yet explained why Russian soldiers, who were not disarmed, surrendered, even though their prospects as POWs were little better than Jews’. Well, that’s not quite right: Bettelheim wrote an outstanding essay about people’s need to maintain an illusion of order and legality in the midst of barbarism, but that runs quite orthogonal to the gun owners’ dreams presented here.
November 10, 2010, 11:17 amChrisTS says:
ShelbyC:
I don’t think that first point is irrelevant to the second point you note.
What made me see red was the borderline explicit equivocation between Nazis using gun registration to slaughter Jews (and others) and gun registration in our nation.
Admittedly, my anger was also fueled by what I took to be a kind of slur against the Jews (and others) who did not engage in armed resistance.
Let’s face it: the Holocaust is, quite properly, a subject that deeply touches any decent person’s heart. For some, gun control/registration is also an emotional issue. Slopping the two together is an invitation to emotional responses.
November 10, 2010, 11:30 amKatahdin says:
No; I’m not saying that having a gun makes you immune to foreign conquest or, for that matter, any other kind of crime. I am saying that armed resistance can be more effective against some threats than unarmed resistance. With the disclaimer that it is hard to accurately predict a priori what one’s behavior in extremis will be, I think that if I was a Ukrainian Jew, I’d rather go down fighting than march up to the pit, disrobe, and wait for the bullet. And I certainly think that people in that circumstance should have the option of resisting, even if they are unlikely to succeed.
November 10, 2010, 11:33 amMarian Kechlibar says:
Andrew Lazarus et al.: why do you keep operating with the population of Jews in Germany proper? The occupied territories like Poland and Hungary had much higher Jewish populations. Eastern Poland was 10-15%, depending on region. Add to this the fact that the rest of the population there were Poles, who were considered Slavic subhumans by Nazis, and you get close to 100% of population with good reason to fight.
November 10, 2010, 11:34 amMarian Kechlibar says:
BTW It is said that hindsight is 20/20. The Jews probably did not expect to be physically annihilated until at least early 1942. Prior to that, Germany was considered country of ancient culture, and even its enemies were loath to admit that it could sink all the way down to mass industrial extermination of people.
November 10, 2010, 11:37 ambuddy larsen says:
…but Mr. Lazarus, you’re ignoring the arc of the war’s development –misplacing what would’ve been critical in the early, plenary, domestic years, wrongly in the later-years context of the massed national armies at the front locked in total war.
There is also the cost/benefit: the benefit of a Weimar 2nd Amendment and its potentially vast complication (and thus possibly reductive of scope) of early Nazi planning, vs the cost, which would have been, as far as i can see, practically nil.
November 10, 2010, 11:37 amAndrew J. Lazarus says:
Because the Weimar German gun control policy was irrelevant to Poland and Hungary. The only group affected by prewar German gun control was the quite small number of German Jews, whom we are now to believe could have taken down the Nazis, if only they still had their guns. While it’s obviously true that Jews who retained their guns could have killed a few Nazis a few years before the Red Army did it for them, there is no reason to think this would have made any real difference. Indeed, some Jews who survived might have been slaughtered as (for example) “good” Germans who hid Jews might have turned against them in the counterfactual.
I submit that further evidence that civilian ownership of guns would have been little impediment to the Holocaust is that I don’t see how a small number of civilian guns could have accomplished what entire armies did not. I suppose this is because I never saw “Red Dawn”, which I believe is the definitive exposition of right-wing guerrilla strategy. In my video store it was shelved with Fiction, but I live in a liberal city.
November 10, 2010, 11:46 amAndrew J. Lazarus says:
You might reconsider, as the Weimar measure, given its timing, was surely aimed at private armies (e.g., the SA). Perhaps vigorous enforcement of gun control in Weimar Germany would have left the Nazis unable to intimidate their political opponents in 1933. (I rather doubt it, but credibility does not seem to be rigorously enforced in the counterfactual universe.)
November 10, 2010, 11:49 ambuddy larsen says:
…BTW (i’ll say this and then quit hogging the thread), GR Mead @ 10:50 has made a tremendous point in observing the empirical evidence the USA has in fact already created.
Why in the world would we want to now fling ourselves backward into the unknown, into vague dreams and dewey hopes of good luck in our quest to live beyond the whim of the worst of human nature?
November 10, 2010, 11:52 amKatahdin says:
Forgive my snark, but you might try the library as a source instead of the video store. For example, try ‘The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1922-1945′ by William Allen. In the early thirties, the Nazis had the support of maybe a third of the populace. One of the other major parties (??Social Democrats??) was supported by about the same amount. They were so paranoid about a Nazi coup (Hitler had already tried once) that they were arming themselves, conducting target practice, and so on. One of the first things the Nazis did was to come up with pretexts for arresting Social Democrat leaders on trumped up charges, and confiscating their weapons. The Social Democrats were preparing for a civil war if the Nazis staged a coup, but (like the frog in the pot) never reacted to the gradual takeover. That’s what a 2nd amendment is about – the populace at large can remain armed until it is obvious it’s time to revolt; they can’t be disarmed early on when reasonable people might still think things will improve.
November 10, 2010, 12:03 pmsetnaffa says:
If you do not like the 2nd Amendment, move to some “Worker’s Paradise” like Cuba, Zimbabwe, or North Korea.
If you don’t like my comment, reread the 1st Amendment.
EVERY petty despot tries to put all the firearms into the hands of his sycophants and disarm all potential opposition forces. Only tyrants and criminals need fear armed Americans.
November 10, 2010, 12:08 pmGordon Langston says:
When you hear the shrill comments of Sen. Diane Feinstein on 60 Minutes where she says, “If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an out-right ban, I would have done it…Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in, I would have done it…The votes were not here.” I think we have it all, feelings, banning, and raving lunacy.
November 10, 2010, 12:12 pmSeaDrive says:
I’m a little surprised that Mr. Kopel gifted us with this “gun power to the people” argument, complete with bathetic speculations, because it has not been a winner in the courts. As he knows much better than I, recent progress in 2A regulation has been based on personal self-defense. It’s completely obvious that no government is going to tolerate armed insurrection, nor did the fledgling government of the US, Bill of Rights not withstanding.
Note: this discussion has suffered from lack of definition of what registration means. The record keeping required of FFLs by the federal gov’t can’t really be called registration. Collection, collation, and use of the data is strictly limited. As I understand it, you can’t take a serial number to a federal database and find out when the gun was last sold by a dealer. Some states and some cities require real registration of some guns. In my state of CT, registration is mandatory for handguns and optional for long guns.
November 10, 2010, 12:39 pmbuddy larsen says:
ok, one more: just as history is the story of wars of extermination and enslavement and cities destroyed by fire and sword long before the nuclear weapons which have at least kept wars smaller and more limited since advent, the story of the early Nazi capture of the city streets does not include much of guns at all. If you look at the photos, you’ll see the favored weapon was a 4′ length of thick electrical cable –flexible, heavy, a bone-breaker in the confines of an urban battlefield, and ‘not a weapon’.
I’d imagine that had all carry of any hand-held object at all had been outlawed, the brownshirts would’ve gone at it with tooth and nail, and fist and boot. It was the will-to-power that was the basic weapon –a will-to-power that may’ve never become so powerful –may’ve never slithered out of the cradle, so to speak, had a 2nd Amendment been in place. Again, what cost, what benefit, what probabilities?
(and yes, Mr. Lazarus, credibility IS touch-and-go in the counterfactual universe –because that universe, being counterfactual, can’t by definition contain any standard for same)
November 10, 2010, 12:40 pmCarl N. Brown says:
Mike Constitution said: “”“You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass.” — Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.”"
Ricardo said: “”No dice: there is no evidence that Yamamoto ever said this.”"
That was a quote from a Japanese junior officer in the 1960s in a bull session between US and Japanese officers about WWII Japanese invasion plans. Over the years it became attributed to Yamamoto.
When Yamamoto did make his other famous crack about America would be defeated when Japanese troops marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in DC, he was being sarcastic: he did not believe it was possible.
Yamato also made a long statement that amounted to the observation that “counting coup” against a sleeping enemy depends on what that enemy does once aroused and fully awake, which got morphed into the semi-bogus movie paraphrase I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and to fill him with a terrible resolve.
Stephen Halbrook is quoted as saying among other things: “”Over a period of several weeks in October and November 1938, the Nazi government disarmed the German Jewish population. … The Nazi hierarchy could now more comfortably deal with the Jewish question without fear of armed resistance by the victims. … What if [Flatow and others] … had not registered his firearms in 1932? …. We will never know, but it is difficult to imagine that he had no regrets.”"
And comment 1 is “”Yet again, comparing any regulation of firearms with being a Nazi….”"
Quotes by Yamamoto and Halbrook both end up like silly putty, picking up manipulated images.
November 10, 2010, 12:43 pmStill need a new handle says:
Huh? Sixth Army surrendered because it had been surrounded by the Red Army for over two months and its last airfields had been captured.
Sixth Army was surrounded because it was out way too far and because the Soviets punched through the weak Romanian forces on its flanks in the brilliant Operation Uranus offensive. The Germans’ less brilliant Winter Storm offensive failed to relieve the pocket, so it was just a matter of time.
November 10, 2010, 12:48 pmStill need a new handle says:
(I got my Soviet offensives mixed up; Uranus created the pocket.)
November 10, 2010, 12:49 pmBarry Youngerman says:
My Aunt Leah, her husband and four of their five children were among 12,000 Jews of Stanislow who were marched to the Jewish cemetery there on October 12, 1942. Mass graves had already been dug, and the people knew what their fate was. By nightfall, after 10,000 Jews had been shot, the rest were allowed to walk home. My relatives were all among the dead.
If 1000 of those Jews had guns, or even if 250 had guns, this would not have happened. There were at most a few hundred guards.
So much of the holocaust resembled this incident: a tiny number of personnel killed a vastly greater number of Jews.
These facts, of course, don’t mean that any gun control law is evil. However, I cannot understand how people can know this history and still regard civilian ownership of guns as evil or stupid, as nearly every liberal I’ve ever met feels.
The only American population that has ever been successfully disarmed was the black community of the southern states, post-Reconstruction. How did that work out?
November 10, 2010, 12:55 pmKevin P. says:
A straw purchase is a federal crime in Texas and in every other state. At the minimum, you should get your terminology correct.
November 10, 2010, 12:56 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
I’ve read it. It’s certainly true that Nazi support in 1933 was about one-third of the population. However, support in 1938, i.e., by Kristallnacht, was much higher, owing to the economic recovery and the repudiation of humiliating clauses of the WWI treaties. Since the Nazis did not confiscate civilian guns in general, this would seem to count against the idea that an armed civilian populace will resist tyranny, much less successfully.
The Social Democrats had their support cut out from under them by the Reichstag Fire, not by the boiling frog. The coup that took place then went forward with only token opposition from anyone besides Communists.
November 10, 2010, 12:58 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
So they would have used more guards. You think they had a shortage?? Or bulldozed their homes. Or whatever. I ask for the third time, what does it say for this theory that the Germans were able to take large groups of Soviet POWs, even though the POWs were surely armed and were highly likely to die in captivity?
November 10, 2010, 1:01 pmBarry Youngerman says:
My Aunt Leah, her husband and four of their five children were among 12,000 Jews of Stanislow who were marched to the Jewish cemetery there on October 12, 1942. Mass graves had already been dug, and the people knew what their fate was. By nightfall, after 10,000 Jews had been shot, the rest were allowed to walk home. My relatives were all among the dead.
If 1000 of those Jews had guns, or even if 250 had guns, this would not have happened. There were at most a few hundred guards.
So much of the holocaust resembled this incident: a tiny number of personnel killed a vastly greater number of Jews.
These facts, of course, don’t mean that any gun control law is evil. However, I cannot understand how people can know this history and still regard civilian ownership of guns as evil or stupid, as nearly every liberal I’ve ever met feels.
The only American population that has ever been successfully disarmed was the black community of the southern states, post-Reconstruction. How did that work out?
Someone mentioned that Holocaust survivors don’t carry. They did in Israel.
November 10, 2010, 1:04 pmElemenope says:
OOPS! Too much fury, too little attention to the keyboard. Xenophobia. (Jeesh, I almost just did it again; bad fingers, bad!) And, yes, I think Zeno is/was a pain.
Oh, my Zeno “movement” joke fell flat! The humanity! :)
November 10, 2010, 1:14 pmRowerinVA says:
Everyone needs to read SLE’s post (November 10, 2010, 1:12 am) again. I wouldn’t advise buying that many guns (if for no other reason, the cost of acquisition and safe storage) but his/her description of the capabilities of small arms is spot-on.
Responding to:
… that’s a strawman. The US military and police aren’t about to wage genocide. SLE didn’t claim that.
The point of a Jew (or anyone else) owning a rifle would not have been in the 1930s, and isn’t today, that there is some fantasy of defeating a whole army. The point is to make mob violence (Kristallnacht) and small-scale state violence difficult and costly, or more preferably to deter it altogether. There are many examples of this being quite successful, in the US and elsewhere. For example, armed blacks were targeted far less frequently by mobs and even Sheriffs in the Jim Crow American south than were blacks that were known to be armed. Bosnian Muslims who were armed fared a whole lot better than those who weren’t, and that example is from just a few years ago.
Kerr, is your point is that Jews in Nazi Germany may have been doomed regardless of whether they were armed? That gun registration / confiscation didn’t make them any worse off, because they were already as bad off as can be? If so, why does that point have anything to do with supporting gun registration in the US, which I take to be your larger point?
November 10, 2010, 1:19 pmmack says:
“So they would have used more guards. You think they had a shortage?? Or bulldozed their homes. Or whatever.”
So more Nazi guards would have died, so more Jews would have escaped immediate murder, and more would have learned how to resist with a gun, and more would have heard of their fellows fighting back, and more would have fought back, and more bulldozers would be shot up, and more convoys shot up, and more Jews would have survived. Or whatever.
I heard by the end of the war as the death camps were working overtime – there was a real shortage of Nazi’s.
November 10, 2010, 1:46 pmdoshei says:
It amazes me that so many people here fail to grasp something that I think is self evident. The point is not “would armed resistance have succeeded against the Nazis” ( or any other despicable government). The point is that to struggle against death is in itself both noble action and an inherent right of man. To deprive people of the ability to do so more effectively is in itself a despicable crime. The effectiveness of the resistance is completely immaterial.
November 10, 2010, 1:51 pm1040 says:
Brilliant post! Other proofs using this technique:
1. The nazis loved parades, therefore Macy’s is evil.
2. The nazis believed in German exceptionalism, so America is evil.
Unfortunately, I am unable to channel the thoughts of murdered Jews to provide conclusive evidence.
November 10, 2010, 1:57 pmredleg says:
Love this post.
First the Nazis took over the Weimar Republic using perfectly legal means to do so, and used those perfectly reasonable laws against the citizens themselves. These laws were passed in the belief they would never be perverted by those with ill intent. Yet they were. If I was a Jew in 1938 I would have wished for nothing better than an old Gew 98. For it is better to die on your feet than live on your knees. This is why all rational Americans should oppose gun registration.
“You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.” – Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto WWII
As an active duty member of the military if asked to execute a patently illegal order I probably would refuse to do so. I think would this would break the military in two. Some would follow those orders and enthusiastically carry them out even against their fellow citizens. Some and I hope many would not. We as a military live and die by our oath– to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. But some would see it one way, and some the other.
And all I need is a pistol. As a military weapon a pistol is only good to fight your way to a rifle. Once I kill a rifleman, I become a rifleman, once I kill a machine gunner, I become a machine gunner. Send troops after a band of guerrillas you end up supplying said guerillas if you don’t don’t do it right. And it never goes all right. Cops and the military have specialized equipment but it only lends you advantage if you can use it. Once you use it against the enemy, he stands a good chance of capturing the same. You are only an amateur the first time, then you are either dead or a veteran. By 2005 in Iraq, all the stupid insurgents were dead. The rest had learned. It reminds me of what a German veteran said on D Day– you had to get the damn paratroopers in the airplanes, because once they made it to the ground there was hell to pay. You will never see it coming. So let us make sure it never gets to that, and I’ll keep my case of 7.62x54R buried in my backyard.
November 10, 2010, 1:59 pm1040 says:
Being too generous, are we not?
Most of them stop short of wanting to exterminate their opposition, but resent the existence of such, vilify it as evil, and would steamroll it if they could. It’s not the guns, it’s the control.
November 10, 2010, 2:00 pmbuddy larsen says:
good one, doshei.
November 10, 2010, 2:00 pmFederal Farmer says:
I think the intended point of the original post was to draw a line from registration to the atrocities of Kristallnacht.
It would be inappropriate to “Monday morning Quarterback” the actions or inactions of the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. They did not have the benefit of hindsight. It is much more appropriate to judge our own actions given we have said hindsight.
I fail to see how someone who knows the murderous 20th Century history of governmental abuse would forward the notion that the government should have a monopoly on force. To say that “it can’t happen here” is to ignore the inglorious portions of our own national history.
It is also an error to assume that the response to some future hypothetical tyrannical abuse would pattern itself like the Civil War, for instance, or a “Red Dawn” type partisan resistence to a foreign invasion. It would instead be a very nasty insurgency with invisible and embedded resisters looking like ordinary citizens by day and engaging in assassination and sabotage by night. The tyrannical government officials would be living in the ‘war zone’ just like everyone else.
I can only speculate on what would be the response were I in the situation where the government came for my guns. I just finished fighting for the right to register them lawfully and have done so. I recognize the risk that I have incurred and the only recourse I have to confiscation would be violent. It may be that I wet myself and hand them over or it may be that the second three through the door trip over the bodies of the first three. Hopefully our efforts to resist such tyranny politically will continue to bear fruit and prevent such eventualities.
We only get to make the mistake of giving up our arms once. It may be that our government continues being (mostly) benevolent to everyone. To assume it will is lunacy. As a Boy Scout I was taught to “hope for the best and prepare for the worst”. That continues as my motto to this day.
November 10, 2010, 2:06 pmRoger Zimmerman says:
Coming late to the party and only got through the first few critical posts, which state that Kopel is trying to say that gun control is akin to Nazism.
He is saying no such thing: “…. details the close connection between the disarmament of the German Jews and what came next.”
So, the point of the post is simply that legal disarmament of the civilian population lowers the cost of imposing dictatorship. It follows that aspiring dictators may seek to use this tool in order to make their jobs easier. And, it also follows that defending the individual right to own guns and ammunition is an important means to preserving freedom.
November 10, 2010, 2:11 pmscattergood says:
After reading through anecdotes and various opinions, nobody seems to have asked when in the last 100-125 years has a well armed populace lost to a conventional army? There are only two examples of this happening that I can think of:
1) The Second Boer War (1899 – 1902) – Having lost the Transvaal to the Boers in the First Boer War, the second time around the British weren’t messing about. They won only because they rounded up and isolated the Boer civilian population into what we now know as ‘concentration camps’. The suffering in the camps was so extensive, and the armed combatants became isolated fish from the sea of the populace, that the Boer’s eventually sued for peace.
2) The Malay Emergency (1948 – 1960) — Again the Communist insurgency was really only solved when the British completely separated the Chinese from the Malay populations, and it took 12 years.
A motivated and relatively well armed civilian population (even without its members having military training) can effectively ‘not lose’ to a formal military force for years or decades.
Those who think otherwise are missing the lessons of history.
November 10, 2010, 2:14 pmbuddy larsen says:
Mr Lazarus, everything the Nazis did was legal. That is why the Allies could not hold the Nuremberg Trials until the legal concept of “crimes against humanity” had been developed in the breach, and in a hurry.
Insofar as the Nazis legal rise to power, the ice gets pretty thin along in there. The “Enabling Act” was granted Hitler by an intimidated and exhausted polity –made so by Nazis, operating in a 2nd Amendment-free environment.
November 10, 2010, 2:16 pmCarl N. Brown says:
“Nazis Hunt Arms in Einstein Home”, N.Y. TIMES, Mar. 21, 1933, at 10 (describing the failed Nazi hunt for a cache of weapons in Albert Einstein’s home; the hunt revealed nothing more dangerous than a bread knife).
No quicker way to demonize someone today that to accuse them of having cache of weapons. Some will even accept the summary execution of the accused.
BTW, is the long commentary here related to the exchange:
Bernard E. Harcourt, “On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler, and Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding the Gun Culture Wars (A Call to Historians)”, 73 Fordham L. Rev. 653 (2004)
and
Stephen Halbrook, “Nazism, the Second Amendment, and the NRA: A Reply to Professor Harcourt”, 11 Texas Rev. Law & Pol. 114 (2006)
November 10, 2010, 2:28 pm1040 says:
saying they’re muslim/kenyan/communist/fascist might be quicker and it also requires no evidence.
November 10, 2010, 2:38 pmredleg says:
and a lot of people forget that in 1775, the Redcoats won the day and burned the empty armory. And lost their ass on march back to Boston, to armed citizens using ambush as a life lesson. So much for gun control.
Gun Control in the Unites States began with the KKK during Reconstruction– as a way to stop getting shot at while trying to innocently burn Negro churches. Education is a helluva thing. RIP Senator Byrd. Hope you are keeping hell warm for all us sinners.
An armed society is a polite society– Heinlein
November 10, 2010, 2:38 pm1040 says:
empirically, accusing somebody of being a muslim/kenyan/communist/fascist/nazi seems to be quicker and has the benefit of not requiring any evidence.
November 10, 2010, 2:45 pmChrisTS says:
Oh, a double pox upon me. Duh. I think the OP and this thread have deranged me.
November 10, 2010, 2:45 pmHenry Bowman says:
Yes, this argument follows the Canadian model: registration laws are invaluable in arresting people for violations against the registration laws, or similar paperwork violations. But I believe the original question was to measure the effectiveness of registration laws in solving actual crimes that victimize actual people, like murder, rape, abduction, assault, or robbery. As you might not believe from a steady diet of CSI or NCIS, this effectiveness is near zero.
November 10, 2010, 2:46 pmBohemond says:
Given Bernanke’s printing of over half a trillion Monopoly dollars, that might not be a bad comparison.
November 10, 2010, 2:48 pmBohemond says:
November 10, 2010, 2:50 pmHarryEagar says:
Do we count the Palestinians?
As for Kristallnacht, Flatow’s arsenal v. the SA?
I know where I’m putting my money in that contest.
November 10, 2010, 3:15 pmbuddy larsen says:
274 comments and hardly a one is both anti-2A and not a reductio ad absurdum.
November 10, 2010, 3:25 pmSeamus says:
So victimhood makes you incapable of drawing incorrect conclusions from your experience?
November 10, 2010, 3:48 pmFrank zee says:
This whole thing is specious. The Jews would not have given resistance and those that think they would deny the survivability strategy of the jews in Europe over several centuries. The jews sucumbed to the worst form of social darwinism.
For pete’s sake the article is speculation at best. And there are no good law professors on this list. Good law professors are not reading this tripe, that is left for us second story guys.
Have a good Vetran’s day.
November 10, 2010, 3:59 pmG.R. Mead says:
Monopoly money has the singular advantage that — at the very least — it will always be worth the paper it is printed on. The same sadly cannot be said of paper money which actually has descended even below the commodity value of the paper itself — hence in late Weimar, people burnt bundles of cash as heating fuel — because it was literally the cheapest thing to burn. The Fed’s money creation is almost utterly digital and so does not even have this remnant utility value.
November 10, 2010, 4:01 pmscattergood says:
Have they ‘lost’ to the IDF? I don’t think so as they have been able to have the IDF leave S. Lebanon, Gaza, and give up control of much of the West Bank.
November 10, 2010, 4:05 pmed bernay says:
yes there is quite a difference. registration aka NYC registration is a prior restraint on a fundamental right with non compliance being prison for the gun owner. It is not designed to be citizen friendly. Its purpose is to make gun ownership difficult. Do criminals register their firearms? When a person goes to a dealer in PA to purchase, they go through NICS and have a nearly instant background check unless there is an issue with that person’s crimal record then which the clearance can be delayed. There are no requirements for character references, credit checks, or employment checks just to exercise a fundamental constitutional right. NYC and California have used their registration records to confiscate certain types of semi auto firearms (or threaten owners that they must move them out of the jurisdiction). Registration will lead to confiscation eventually and has no deterent effect for crime or usefulness in criminal prosecutions. How many criminals has NYC caught because of their registration requirement?
November 10, 2010, 4:34 pmSuperNaut says:
It is important for my education to come to VC, I learn things like:
1. You can’t fight an army of tanks and planes with only small arms, despite history (and the present) being replete with contrary examples.
November 10, 2010, 5:12 pm2. If you try to learn from history you are blaming the victim.
3. Gun registration is very beneficial, because criminals register their guns.
4. The US Military is exactly like the SS
5. The proper response to tyranny is surrender, because resistance makes tyrants really mad and they become tyrant-er.
Owen H. says:
Idiots like those comparing anyone that supports any form of weapons regulation with Nazis or the KKK are the real biggest risk to our rights. By using such asinine hyperbole, the alienate a lot of people that might otherwise be supportive. The vast majority I am sure do think they are Nazis or racist in their motivations, and it simply demonstrates to them that gun owners must be stupid assholes, so why listen to anything they say, it is only lies.
November 10, 2010, 5:21 pmbuddy larsen says:
Owen H, just to pick out one contradiction: if pro 2A lies are so powerfully demonstrating their stupid Nazi KKK assholery to the vast majority, why in the world are you advising that vast majority to not listen?
For example, while you are on the opposite end of the issue from me, i rather delight in seeing comments such as yours, and trust that they’re educational in ways that nothing else could be.
November 10, 2010, 5:54 pmRyan Olcott says:
Reductio ad absurdum is a legitimate technique of argument, in which the principles of an arguments premises are scaled to their most absurd extents.
What you’re really trying to get at is that they’re making absurd straw man arguments – they aren’t adhering to the principles of the arguments they attack.
What I don’t get about gun control advocates is that, presumably, their goal is to reduce the ability of people to initiate force against their innocent neighbors. Their proposed means of doing so is to… initiate force against their innocent neighbors.
Prohibiting an activity fundamentally relies on force to back up the prohibition. Force is the only way to make a person act against their own interests.
November 10, 2010, 6:05 pmOwen H. says:
Because I am a gun owner and don’t want to lose my rights because of idiots making people think we are all stupid assholes. If gun-right supporters keeping calling regulation-supporters Nazis and racists, when these regulation-supporters know they aren’t Nazis and racists, then they will discount everything that any gun-rights supporter says, no matter how reasonable. They will not want to engage with someone calling them a Nazi. It’s rather like the crazies that declare the 2nd means they should be allowed to have unrestricted possession of nuclear weapons; they make the rest of us look bad.
November 10, 2010, 6:16 pmyankev says:
Either way, the text is pretty explicit that it occurred in Persia and that it was the king of Persia, not the king of Babylon, who issued the edict.
November 10, 2010, 6:28 pmyankev says:
Yeah, just because something is written into a proposed bill does not mean that anyone is trying to cause it to happen.
November 10, 2010, 6:35 pmyankev says:
California has, however, used gun registration records to threaten prosecution of the owners of certain types of guns that were legal when purchased and later outlawed in California.
November 10, 2010, 6:38 pmyankev says:
Perhaps he does not realize that Texas is now part of the United States.
November 10, 2010, 6:42 pmyankev says:
I think that depends on who and when. Although a handgun would certainly be less effective than a rifle or shotgun. But I seem to recall that the Bielsky group, among others, put firearms to good use in saving their own lives and those of many unarmed Jews.
Not that having a firearm is enough. Several of the Bielsky brothers had served in the military, and had also received training as members of Betar. They also maintained pre-war ties with local smugglers and with the Soviet sponsored partisans. But without firearms their survival rate would have been much lower.
November 10, 2010, 6:51 pmyankev says:
That’s because you know what was on the other end. Most of those who got into the cattle cars did not. The Germans were pretty expert at keeping that knowledge from the Jews, who thought they were going to be relocated, not exterminated. And some wanted to stay with their wives and children to protect them or even comfort them as long as possible. It’s very easy now to say what one would have or should have done then.
November 10, 2010, 6:55 pmEd says:
How do you feel about the contention by the Jews For the Preservation of Firearms Ownership that the 1968 US Gun Control Act was modeled after the 1938 Nazi Weapons Law? Are they stupid assholes? link here http://jpfo.org/filegen-a-m/GCA_68.htm
November 10, 2010, 7:12 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
JFTR, this is not true. Murder of a Jew was not lawful in the Third Reich, although of course this law was utterly ignored.
Why don’t you look at mack’s comment directly above yours, positing some sort of feedback loop where a few more German guards shot in one Aktion turns into a stunning defeat of the Holocaust.
We’ve had two generations struggling with the idea that there wasn’t really much Aunt Leah could do about her fate, and it looks like we haven’t finished yet. Although, of course, Aunt Leah, not being a resident of Weimar Germany, was completely unaffected by Weimar gun control laws that affected only a few Jews.
November 10, 2010, 7:15 pmSteve (CT) says:
Has anybody that believes registration is a good idea provided any evidence that it reduces crime? Should we rely on their belief that it is a ‘common sense’ law? Personally, I would like to see some statistics that prove there is a benefit to the inconvenience & potential future abuse.
My state of CT already requires registration & authorization whenever a handgun is transferred between permitted residents. A couple years ago a ‘lost & stolen’ firearm law was passed that the state police claimed was needed to prosecute those that would illegally provide guns to criminals & then claim them to be lost or stolen. To date there have been zero prosecutions under this ‘much needed’ law.
Last year the state police sent notices to a large number of gun owners requesting them to send copies of their transfer paperwork (required to be kept for 20 years) to the state police because, uh, they couldn’t find their copies. Yup, that registration works great in a government bureaucracy. Note that the only way the state knew about the transfer in the first place is because the gun owners had already properly notified the police.
November 10, 2010, 7:27 pmOwen H. says:
Bills get written all the time. I recall bills that would have banned my faith at military bases, or stripped it of the ability to file as a tax-exempt religious organization. But it didn’t happen. Should I be treating all that hold similar political views as those who tried as if that were their goal too?
November 10, 2010, 8:21 pmOwen H. says:
What do they base that contention on? Is it their claim that the goal was to deprive Jews of firearms so that they could later be rounded up? If it is, then yes.
November 10, 2010, 8:23 pmOwen H. says:
When you call some a Nazi, and they know they aren’t a Nazi, you have destroyed any chance of dialogue. And destroyed any chance that they will listen to anything else you say.
November 10, 2010, 8:31 pmOwen H. says:
Having now read the website Ed; yes, they are crazy assholes.
And for the record, I own firearms and my family is Jewish.
November 10, 2010, 8:33 pmBrett Bellmore says:
They’ve managed to establish that Senator Thomas J. Dodd, who played a part in writing it, had a copy of the 1938 Nazi Weapons Law in his personal library, in the original German. He provided it to the committee that drafted the Act, to be translated into English for the committee’s proceedings.
“Modeled after”? Perhaps a stretch, depending on how the actual text compares. Influenced by? Yeah…
November 10, 2010, 8:56 pmbuddy larsen says:
Mr Lazarus, thank you, i did not not know that. I had thought the Wannsee Conference had made the whole thing legal.
Owen H, i think you’re under the impression that to recall the slippery-slope, wedge-issue, camel’s-nose-under-the-tent-flap nature of escalating levels of control until, well, as you read here, people can be loaded against their will onto trains without force because the end the controllers have in mind is unknown to them, is to call all anti-2A folks Nazis. I don’t think this is what has been happening on this thread. Not at all.
November 10, 2010, 9:39 pmChrisTS says:
On the other hand, you might convince your fellow non-Nazi citizens that they should be armed.
I’m beginning to give serious thought to having a rifle (at least). This is not because I fear the fascistic take-over of our government, but because I am beginning to fear my fellow citizens – some of whom, admittedly, might support such a government.
At the very least, all these breast-beating howls about shooting service-members, police, and anyone who dares to threaten another [according to those who feel threatened] makes me concerned about the survival of any civil society.
So, I want to be able to feed my family on the good, American deer and the nasty, illegal Canada geese that frequent our property. Also, of course, when the End comes, I will want to be able to shoot any other persons who try to pick apples or pears from our trees.
I’m thinking about crosss-bows, as well. I could kill animals for food without the noise that would attract demented humans not directly related to me.
Failing all this, yes, I would rather take myself out (heroically expressed) than be murdered and eaten by my former citizen peers.
Of course, I also worry, as my son asks when we watch one of the many zombie/flesh-eating/virus-maddened populace films, “Who will take care of the animals in zoos and on farms?” So, after I have slaughtered all fellow humans not well-known to me, I intend to go out and free the entrapped animals.
There’s the real moral high ground for you.
November 10, 2010, 9:45 pmbuddy larsen says:
To be or not to be something or other is always gonna depend on the risk/reward –and that’s really the whole point of leaning as far forward as possible on the broadest reading of 2A. Take the Nazis –had not the way been open for their growth in say ’32 to ’38, had there been more risk and less reward to joinin’ up, there surely would’ve been some number fewer of them, and and the movement itself would surely have not gone quite so stark raving mad. Converesely, there are czars and czarinas in and around this very administration at this very moment –John Holdren and Carole Browner come to mind, not to mention Ayers and blushing bride –that, had they been hanging around the universities in 30s Germany, would have, i believe, in a trice jumped into the tight black SS uniformed movement –the eugenics, the greeniness, the quiet, blue-nosed lunacy of intellectual absolutism, all right up their alley. Er, i guess i just made Owen H’s point, didn’t i. Oh well, that’s just me.
November 10, 2010, 10:09 pmG.R. Mead says:
They labored in innocence and an inability to even imagine such evil was really possible. Tens of millions of dead later we are burdened by our knowledge of the reality of evil — we are not innocents. No one is innocent, evil is real — and bides its time.
November 10, 2010, 10:17 pmvadimi says:
You may choose to trust your government, I choose not to. I have seen too many examples of good people going bad once given power. Nazis were not an abomination, they were a perfect example of a human animal, this is why they are being referenced here.
November 10, 2010, 10:34 pmThe same hatred is being perpetrated by muslims this very day, and the world chooses to ignore it. You do as you wish, but I will not surrender my liberty and then my life, or the lives of those I have sworn to protect. May G-d help you.
buddy larsen says:
…and Mead, it is all yet in living memory.
November 10, 2010, 10:48 pmKerr says:
And it is silly to imagine that those people with essentialy the same level of armament would hold off a US Mech. Infantry brigade for 5 hours much less five months. The technology has changed too damned much
November 11, 2010, 2:41 amCarl N. Brown says:
Owen H. said: “”Idiots like those comparing anyone that supports any form of weapons regulation with Nazis or the KKK…. “”
Pointing out that national socialists and segregationists used gun laws to disarm the targets of their bigotry and to assure that only the “right people” were legally armed, is scarcely comparing “anyone who supports any form of weapons regulation with Nazis or the KKK”.
It is pointing out that national socialists and segregationists used gun laws to disarm the targets of their bigotry and to assure that only the “right people” were legally armed.
Earlier I mentioned out the Harcourt-Halbrook-Harcourt exchange because Halbrook 2006 was in response to Harcourt 2004 who quoted William L. Pierce (author of “The Turner Diaries”) and claimed that “the Nazis were relatively more pro-gun than the predecessor Weimar Republic….” in the 2004 Fordham Law Review symposium against the second amendment. This debate has been going on for awhile (my uncle has JPFO stickers on the windows of his cabin).
The Nazis, like the Jim Crow South, had no problem with the “correct people” having guns. Segregation era gun control included the Tennessee Army and Navy pistol law (banning affordable handguns) and some county sheriffs who at their discretion granted “special deputy badges” to Klansmen.
John Salter and Don Kates in “The Necessity of Access to Firearms by Dissenters and Minorities Whom Government is Unwilling or Unable to Protect” (pages 185-193, “Restricting Handguns” North River Press, 1979) start off by quoting Adolf Hitler: “The most foolish mistake we possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so.” As a young 1960s lawyer Kates participated in the Mississippi black voter registration drive; Kates was armed against Klan violence. John Salter bore scars from a Klan attempt on his life: both men opposed gun controls like the NY Sullivan Act and the discretionary gun permit laws in the South.
For over sixty years it has been a staple of gun control propaganda to make false claims like the one that Robert DePugh’s Minutemen got guns through the NRA or the one that a NRA-supported gun club in Harlem was a dangerous radical group. Gun controllers like to portray themselves as noble crusaders for goodness and light, and proponents of gun rights as nazis, klansmen and racists. Pointing out the ugly fact that nazis, klansmen and racists have a history of using gun control to control people is an overdue corrective to a half-century drumbeat of pro-gun control propaganda.
I support shall-issue permit to carry based on passing a test on self-defense law, demonstrating gun safety and basic markmanship capability, and having no criminal record. I have no problem with anyone pointing out that national socialists and segregationists used discretionary gun laws to disarm the targets of their bigotry and to assure that only the “right people” were legally armed. I sure as heck don’t read that as comparing anyone who supports any form of weapons regulation with Nazis or the KKK.
November 11, 2010, 3:09 amCarl N. Brown says:
“”“monopoly of force” theory of the state”"
Gun control advocates love to quote Hobbes and Weber. I think Weber is misquoted: he included lawful self-defense and even private security forces within his definition of a functioning state. The morph of state control over the lawful use of violence to a state based on monopoly of force is a misunderstanding of Weber.
November 11, 2010, 3:28 ambuddy larsen says:
To ‘still need new handle’ at 12:48 PM on Nov 10: sir, i don’t believe we are in any disagreement. We’re just observing cause on the one hand and effect on the other.
November 11, 2010, 5:21 amMarian Kechlibar says:
Someone earlier mentioned Bosnia as showing examples of successful use of small firearms against attempted genocide.
This year, I actually travelled around Bosnia and visited a memorial to the war. Even the siege of Sarajevo was actually caused by effective use of small firearms by civilians and a few policemen. Those guns included makeshift primitive guns that you’d be normally afraid to fire lest they crack.
At the onset of the siege, Serb forces attempted several armored attacks against the city and forced their way up to the center, but they were always repelled by the numerically superior, though worse equipped defenders. After a few attempts, they withdrew from the city limits and switched tactics to extensive sniping and artillery shelling from the surrounding hills.
The said Serb attackers were no simpletons with guns, many of them were actually Yugoslav professional soldiers, and their equipment came from the Yugoslav depots. Yugoslav army, though not comparable to the current Western forces, was still an effective force born from long WWII fighting and trained for long-expected confrontation with the Warsaw Pact (which would mean USSR, basically).
So you can basically say that Sarajevans in 1992 were able to beat a technically superior army for some time, and thus saved them from a Srebrenica style massacre of giant proportions. I doubt that many Sarajevans would survive fall of their city to the hands of the enemy.
November 11, 2010, 5:50 amMithras says:
Here’s a hypo for you all. Should the Japanese Americans who were rounded up and put into internment camps by Roosevelt (zomg liberalfascism!) during WW II have gone down shooting at the authorities who came to take them away?
November 11, 2010, 8:32 amCarl N. Brown says:
Did the Nisei have a reasonable expectation that (a) they would be interned for the duration or (b) they would be exterminated? They believed (a) and were right.
In regard to the Jews in Poland, “Schindler’s List” makes the point many interned Jews in forced labor camps believed that if they showed they were valuable workers, the State would spare them. They believed (a) and were often wrong. Those sent to concentration and extermination camps realized their fate far too late for meaningful resistance, except in isolated but memorable instances.
You want something closer to home on this discussion, research the history of Matewan and Blair Mountain, West Virginia, 1920-21.
November 11, 2010, 10:02 ambuddy larsen says:
Mithras, what is the date of this decision, within the hypo? Now, or then?
November 11, 2010, 10:12 amdoshei says:
Unless I am missing your argument based on a partial quote from me, I don’t think you absorbed my point. I am not endorsing either side in the argument regarding the effectiveness of resistance. I am saying the entire argument is specious because the right to fight against death and particularly murder has it’s own inherent value that is completely unimpacted by the success of that struggle. Death while fighting back is inherently a better event than death while capitulating. I understand that many people in these situations are unable to resist for various reasons but I would be surprised if most of those unable to resist would have chosen not to given the means.
November 11, 2010, 10:54 amdoshei says:
“And it is silly to imagine that those people with essentialy the same level of armament would hold off a US Mech. Infantry brigade for 5 hours much less five months. The technology has changed too damned much”
As a former Special Forces Weapons Sergeant I can tell you holding off an Infantry Brigade is not the point. It is also quite possible if by “hold off” you mean prevent them from accomplishing their objectives.
November 11, 2010, 11:01 amKeith says:
The discussion is missing out on several important uprisings.
Successful uprisings occured at Trblinka and Sobibor extermination camps. Following the Sobibor escape, the camp was razed and forest re-planted to disguise the evidence.
Here is a link to the wiki page for Sobibor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sobibor_extermination_camp
Auschwitz also had an uprising, though less successful in terms of escapes, it did damage camp infrastructure.
The Young Hugo Gryn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Gryn later a reform rabbi, was imprisoned in Auschwitz. In the early 90s he participated in a BBC radio debate about whether killing could ever be justified (BBC Radio 4; “The Moral Maze”). Gryn’s response was that he had killed, an east European camp guard who took sadistic pleasure in killing inmates. Gryn and some other youths had managed to catch this character when he was without support, and he was pretty unrepentant about having participated.
I think many of the earlier commenter are well used to the myth of
“inevitability”
many more here are not.
There is a possibly apocryphal story of a senior Nazi diplomat (sic) being sent to persuade the Swiss to join the greater Germany. The Swiss who was picking him up from the station, asked him to choose a house, any house, which the Nazi did. The Swiss stopped at the house and knocked at the door, asking the householder to fetch his gun. The householder returned with a schmiesser submachinegun. The Nazi got the message, and returned home, empty handed. Switzerland remained independent, despite being landlocked by Axis occupied territory.
All Swiss who are fit for military service are in the militia. Switzerland has (as Machiavelli noted in the 1500s) more arms and has enjoyed more freedom than any other place in Europe, since around 1100 AD to present. The connection was not lost on that tough Italian political realist.
November 11, 2010, 11:09 ambuddy larsen says:
I could not more agree with doshei. There’s a principle involved, and in truth it doesn’t rest on outcome at all. Besides, what forecast outcome is ever guaranteed? Expediency factored into this issue will relentlessly redound to the darker corners of human nature.
November 11, 2010, 11:09 ambuddy larsen says:
Would anyone say that the Warsaw Uprising should not have been made? Even though the Jews lost the battle itself? Yes, those who died in the uprising lost the possibility of long postwar lives filled with grandchildren and love, but OTOH we will all be gone in a hundred years and our names will be forgotten to boot. The fighters in the uprising will be told of forever, their names reverent around the campfires of their tribe. Listen, our species needs heros –accountants can always be trained up.
November 11, 2010, 11:30 amGaston says:
“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let’s not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.” –Adolf Hitler, dinner talk on April 11, 1942, quoted in Hitler’s Table Talk 1941-44: His Private Conversations, Second Edition (1973), Pg. 425-426.
I know of no better endorsement of gun control.
November 11, 2010, 12:29 pmFederal Farmer says:
And they don’t have to. They aren’t going to send a brigade into a neighborhood to get an insurgent unless they want to demolish it and that will only create more rebels.
November 11, 2010, 1:15 pmmack says:
Andrew J. Lazarus says: “Why don’t you look at mack’s comment directly above yours, positing some sort of feedback loop where a few more German guards shot in one Aktion turns into a stunning defeat of the Holocaust.”
What I wrote was in response to this by Andrew J. Lazarus: “So they would have used more guards. You think they had a shortage?? Or bulldozed their homes. Or whatever.”
Which he wrote in response to a post by Barry Youngerman describing the specific circumstances of the death of his family members in the Holocaust:
“My Aunt Leah, her husband and four of their five children were among 12,000 Jews of Stanislow who were marched to the Jewish cemetery there on October 12, 1942. Mass graves had already been dug, and the people knew what their fate was. By nightfall, after 10,000 Jews had been shot, the rest were allowed to walk home. My relatives were all among the dead.
If 1000 of those Jews had guns, or even if 250 had guns, this would not have happened. There were at most a few hundred guards.
So much of the holocaust resembled this incident: a tiny number of personnel killed a vastly greater number of Jews.”
What I wrote was: “So more Nazi guards would have died, so more Jews would have escaped immediate murder, and more would have learned how to resist with a gun, and more would have heard of their fellows fighting back, and more would have fought back, and more bulldozers would be shot up, and more convoys shot up, and more Jews would have survived. Or whatever.
I heard by the end of the war as the death camps were working overtime — there was a real shortage of Nazi’s.”
Out of which somehow Mr. Lazarus draws the conclusion that my post describes a “stunning defeat of the Holocaust.”
What I posted and stated specifically was that more Jews would have survived immediate execution and more Nazi’s would have died.
What seems implicit in a lot of the posters opposing the idea that increased gun ownership and armed resistance would have been a more effective response, whether or not it would have stopped the Holocaust – is that somehow they see even the consideration of such a thought as somehow blaming those who died as victims of the Holocaust for not more often choosing to do so. I haven’t read one post that I can recall in this entire thread that did that – nor have I read one post the claimed that if the Jews had been armed then the Holocaust would not have happened at all. What I have read is people trying to understand what happened and learn lessons from it – including the lesson that it is never a good idea allow the government to register all guns as it can assist evil people in the next new government a decade or a hundred years hence in enacting tyrannical laws or rule.
I don’t impute Nazism to the modern day proponents of gun control – I suppose some of the proponents of gun control actually believe it will work or have a positive outcome. I do know that some of the leaders of the gun control movement are not above distorting facts, telling half truths, and lying. And yes I “assume” and I “believe” that they do not do so out of ignorance or stupidity – because I do not believe they are stupid or totally ignorant. I “believe that they do so to further their agenda to impose more gun control. I also “believe” that the leaders in the gun control movement essentially and ultimately want to ban the private ownership of guns. I “believe” that because I have heard many of them say so at different times and because I have never heard them once describe any current of proposed gun control law as unreasonable or a violation of the RKBA.
November 11, 2010, 1:58 pmbuddy larsen says:
And the next question for Mack: Why, when these same people must be well-aware of the laboriously-collected and rigorously-vetted county stats from studies sprinkled across the nation that conclusively show that violent crime is higher where private gun ownership is lower (the facts which led Prof. Bellesiles to so utterly disgrace himself), do these people persist in such efforts to eventually ban guns?
Why, when they must know that their own and their loved ones’ personal safety is enhanced by proximity to privately-owned guns, are they so ardent? What is it they have in mind?
November 11, 2010, 2:39 pmbuddy larsen says:
Could it be that they all have some O’Donnell blood? As in Lawrence, who proudly exclaimed on tv the other day that “I’m a Socialist and I’m for banning guns”, or as in Rosie, who it turns out is escorted from her public, often anti-gun soliliquizing, appearances by one or two 9mm semi-auto strapped bodyguards?
Clearly, Rosie is very concerned about her own personal safety, but not at all about yours and mine. And Lawrence, well it could hardly be more obvious that he sees private gun ownership as an obstacle to his preferred national political organization –which unfortunately for you and I includes you and me –at least for awhile, in the beginning.
November 11, 2010, 2:57 pmKeith says:
Buddy,
I doubt if they are aware that Hitler was the culmination of over 130 years of attempts at “planning” society.
They won’t have read Hayek’s discussion of it.
Here’s the pictures version, the full thing is well worth the read. Hayek wrote it to explain how many of the plans being made ready for the war ending in England, were the same ideas he’d heard in Germany 25 and 30 years earlier, and they really did lead to Hitlerism.
November 11, 2010, 3:37 pmhttp://mises.org/books/TRTS/
Kerr says:
If there objective is to kill you armed civilians in a situation like Warsaw can’t stop them from reaching their objective. “Kill them all” is one of the easiest military objectives when you have overwhelming firepower. A sniper is fairly easily handled if you blow up the building where he is hiding, or any that he could hide
A MOAB would have ended the Warsaw fight in about 10 seconds
November 11, 2010, 3:57 pmSeaDrive says:
When you put it that way, it doesn’t seem an unworthy goal, but I don’t think your statement captures the true flavor.
Most gun control advocates have little knowledge of guns, and see the gun issue in a narrow context. They are worried about gun crime, they know of someone who used a gun to commit suicide, they heard about a case of road rage that exploded into a gunfight. They don’t know about marksmanship programs, they don’t hunt, they are completely unaware of how many guns there are in their environment (until some lady’s handbag drops with a heavy clunk on the floor of the doctor’s office and she owns up).
It’s not just the general public that suffers from the skewed perception. Many Chiefs of Police see guns mostly in terms of danger to their guys.
It’s emotional. It’s like killing a snake or bug that’s going on it’s own way not bothering anyone.
November 11, 2010, 4:16 pmCarl N. Brown says:
Sobibor and Treblinka
November 11, 2010, 4:24 pmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treblinka_extermination_camp
gray says:
I’ve seen the Swiss example used here a few times without noting the Swiss have conscription and those people with the assault rifles at home have undertaken military training and are liable for further service and training.
November 11, 2010, 5:11 pmBohemond says:
So? They are still guns- full-auto guns- in private hands and homes, not locked up in armories. Moreover, when a Swiss finishes his reserve obligation he is still entitled to keep his rifle (converted to semi). And you’re overlooking the fact that the Swiss in addition have truly vast numbers of civilian arms owned outright, that the Government promotes the shooting sports, even to children, and that even the cost of ammo is subsidized.
If the Brady Bunch logic were remotely valid, Zurich’s gutters should be awash with blood every night. But quite he reverse is of course true: the Swiss have about the lowest crime rate in the world.
November 11, 2010, 5:22 pmbuddy larsen says:
Keith & SeaDrive, i’m sure y’all are right about the 80% of the old 80/20 rule. But if i had to guess i’d say around 20% (of the ardent anti-gunners) are as worried or more about stopping Minutemen than stopping murderers.
November 11, 2010, 5:29 pmKeith says:
Re Swiss:
See my comment at 11:09am
The Swiss system is a citizens militia, not conscription – very different. For those in more general roles, service is for a couple of weeks annually. Specialist roles, such as combat flying are full time employment.
The militia goes hand in hand with effectively Athenian democracy within the Cantons of the Swiss Federation.
What point are you trying to make about “military training”?
November 11, 2010, 5:30 pmdoshei says:
The only thing that ends an armed guerrilla insurrection is the rejection of the guerrillas by the population. While in the Warsaw Uprising the lightly armed fighters were also in a tightly constrained area that is generally not the case. If you are arguing that the answer to armed rebellion is technology and firepower you will have to be a lot more convincing to overcome the experiences of the last century.
November 11, 2010, 5:58 pmMithras says:
I think people on here who are advocating taking up arms against the government are not really thinking through the implications of what they are suggesting.
Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt, head of the Western Command:
That sounds like intent to commit mass murder to me. Japanese Americans knew they were hated, knew people like DeWitt wanted to “wiped them off the map”, but still they went like sheep to the concentration camps. Fortunately for them, the Americans didn’t massacre them.
By Kopel’s logic, Japanese-Americans should have gone down fighting and killed as many U.S. soldiers and policeman as possible before they themselves were killed or captured, rather than allow themselves to be taken to the concentration camps.
Also by the logic of the people on here, the group who should be arming themselves to the teeth right now are … Muslim Americans, especially those of foreign descent. They’re a tiny minority, hated, suspected or feared by many. The government has shown casual disregard for their Fourth Amendment rights, so they know someone is watching and listening all the time. If there is another catastrophic terrorist attack in the U.S., the government may in fact pull a Roosevelt and preemptively detain Muslims. If federal agents are at the door, do you advise them to shoot?
November 11, 2010, 5:59 pmyankev says:
And it would have diverted the MOAB from being used elsewhere.
As it was, poison gas eneded the fight, but it took the Nazis a while to realize that’s what it would take. Meanwhile they lost time, personnel and morale. There’s no guaranty that a partisan will survive, but disrupting or retarding the enemey’s war effort may help your relatives or allies survive.
November 11, 2010, 6:12 pmbuddy larsen says:
Who has advocated taking arms against the government? The advocacy has been toward maintaining and not letting slip away in barely-noticed increments –probably never to be regained –the Jeffersonian ideal he stated succinctly with something along the lines of ‘the people in fear of the government is tyranny, the government in fear of the people is liberty’.
No one who has any knowledge of Kansas and Missouri in 1860-65 will blithely suggest any form of retail civil violence at all, except when there might be no choice but it or something worse.
November 11, 2010, 6:16 pmbuddy larsen says:
Folks who want to fight out citizen vs citizen the American culture war should first take a long read thru the history of Kansas and Missouri in 1860 to 1865. It’s bad, real bad, almost unbelievably bad, considering how close in time we are, a mere handful of generations.
November 11, 2010, 6:26 pmMithras says:
Kopel was talking about a German Jew who — he imagined — regretted not shooting it out with German police who came to take him away. So this raises the question, when do you shoot? Would Japanese-Americans been right to resist and kill the police who came to take them away in 1941?
If you’re going to have to theory of when killing policemen is okay, it might pay to flesh it out a bit.
November 11, 2010, 8:28 pmbuddy larsen says:
I’ll sure grant you that, Mithras. I just don’t have an answer to your question. Maybe Potter Stewart’s answer is best, that we’ll know it when we see it.
I expect that if the situation ever came to pass, the local cops and the local armed citizens will be more or less on the same side.
Search “what if the generals refuse to shoot?” –there’s an article out there, a pretty good one –
November 11, 2010, 8:45 pmbuddy larsen says:
A point, too, Mithras, is this for the hypo: what if the Japanese-American citizens had been armed and ready to fight internment? Might FDR have delved a bit deeper into the idea’s feasibility? I see Gen. DeWitt’s quote but we can rest assured that his voice was one of several which counted, and that at any rate the whole coloration of the atmosphere in which he spoke would likely have been different had the Japanese-Americans themselves been of a different mind at the time.
November 11, 2010, 8:58 pmbuddy larsen says:
Search Youtube [ german american bund madison square garden ] –the left will say that there was no internment of that bunch, due to racism. Could it be that it was also (or instead) at least in part due to Smith & Wesson?
November 11, 2010, 9:08 pmHank Archer says:
I think I can provide a partial answer to this one. Russian soldiers who surrendered were essentially unarmed at the time of their surrender due to the fact that they had little or no ammunition left and were also effectively out of other necessary supplies.
In addition Russian soldiers expected (hoped?) that the Germans would abide by the Geneva Convention’s guidelines on treatment of POWs (Germany was a signatory and generally did abide by it in its treatment of British & American POWs).
November 11, 2010, 11:51 pmChris BeHanna says:
Four million of them take to the woods in Pennsylvania alone every December.
The number whom would continue to do so when it is shown that it’s simply another means of suicide is even smallerYou still haven’t explained why you think the US Military is a threat to Democracy
No, it isn’t.
You have those requirements in Pennsylvania (where I spent the first forty years of my life, btw) because you have some stupid laws. They do NOTHING, nothing at all, to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, and they never did.
November 12, 2010, 12:30 amRicardo says:
Gen. DeWitt was the critical force behind internment. If he had opposed internment just as J. Edgar Hoover and the Office of Naval Intelligence had, it probably would not have happened. FDR’s orders and the law passed by Congress authorizing removal and detention of civilians left a substantial amount of discretion in the hands of the military commanders on the ground and DeWitt was the highest ranked general on the West Coast. Internment never happened on a large scale on the East Coast or in Hawaii probably in large part because local military commanders there opposed the idea.
I’m not sure what the relative firearm ownership rate was between Japanese-Americans on the West Coast and white Americans but even if the ownership rate was higher among Japanese-Americans, that would have only contributed to the paranoia and fear. They would have been told to turn their guns in and if they refused, severe criminal penalties would have followed.
November 12, 2010, 12:40 amRicardo says:
Let me revise my previous statement by saying DeWitt was the critical force behind evacuation, not internment. Internment came about because no state west of the Mississippi wanted a large influx of Japanese-Americans. DeWitt did, as I recall, try to convince the Western governors to help resettle Japanese-Americans from the West Coast but they refused.
November 12, 2010, 1:50 amgray says:
Well no and yes. There is conscription. but you can do all of your service at once and then go home with your rifle , or do your service in smaller bits with a liability of a few weeks a year for a number of years.
Regardless, those trained and armed Swiss males remain liable for call up to the regular army in the case of a requirement.
The point I am trying to make is that it is not merely an “armed citizenry” but akin to a reserve force of trained soldiers who must abide by considerable regulations in the storage of their weapons. This is not the argument I see made by the pro-gun when I they trot out Switzerland as an example.
November 12, 2010, 6:38 amCarl N. Brown says:
On the one issue:
It is true that Swiss militia men are issued a sealed battle pack of ammo that must be accounted for; the sealed battle pack must be kept in reserve. It is also true they are given access to surplus ammo, and encouraged to buy ammo, for practice on their own time. Also Swiss civilians may own sporting guns as well, including militia men who own sporting arms.
On another issue:
Quote: “”If you’re going to have to theory of when killing policemen is okay, it might pay to flesh it out a bit.”"
Tennessee, Texas, and other states have laws stating that self-defense can be invoked as a justification against a police officer acting illegally: if an officer indicates you are going to be killed even if you comply, he is acting criminally. In the Ruby Ridge trial the jury was instructed by the federal judge that they could consider self-defense in the shooting of Marshal Degan by Kevin Harris; Harris was acquitted when the only grounds open for acquittal was self-defense.
The Nisei had no reason to believe they would be killed if they complied with internment; and they were not. The majority of the Jews, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc. had no reason to believe they would be killed if they complied with internment; but they often were.
November 12, 2010, 9:11 amMithras says:
Exactly. So having weapons for self-defense against the government is only relevant if you have the opportunity to use them in time to materially alter the outcome (either for yourself or others). Absent a theory of how that can happen, stockpiling arms and fantasizing about liberal American Nazis is useless or potentially destructive.
November 12, 2010, 9:47 amBarry Youngerman says:
Andrew J. Lazarus wites:
“We’ve had two generations struggling with the idea that there wasn’t really much Aunt Leah could do about her fate, and it looks like we haven’t finished yet. Although, of course, Aunt Leah, not being a resident of Weimar Germany, was completely unaffected by Weimar gun control laws that affected only a few Jews.”
My point, as I believe I made clear, was not primarily about Weimar’s gun registration. It was about the importance of decent people (for example my family) owning and knowing how to use guns. Many liberals in the US (including most of the liberal Jews I know) seem to think that it is stupid for any law-abiding person to own a gun. I believe stories like that of my family show the opposite to be the case. It’s also clear to me, living on the Upper West Side, that liberal opinion makers would love to outlaw all private guns, if they could, as they make no bones about that when they argue in private.
I know America is different, but I do NOT believe American citizens have different DNA than other humans. Laws should not be based on the hope that America will NEVER become un-America.
As far as Nazi deception: It took many hours for the very small number of armed Nazis to shoot 10,000 people; after the first few minutes everyone in the crowd knew what their fate would be. Aunt Leah knew her children would be murdered before her eyes. If I were Aunt Leah I would have used my gun at that point, and so would most people have done. Although no one can ever PROVE what might have been, it seems reasonable to me to believe that at the very least, scores of thousands of Jews who were murdered in similar incidents would have been saved.
It might have been better than that. If more German personnel were being killed by armed Jews all over the theater, there might have been more pushback from the military against the prioritization of the Holocaust. Also, some non-Jewish militiamen might have had second thoughts about volunteering for these tasks if there was at least a potential cost to them. As it was, there was zero cost to them (assuming there is no God), and much benefit: a small salary, an “in” with the government, sadistic pleasure for a few.
I would go farther in my speculation: part of the hatred the Nazis felt toward the Jews was based on contempt for their unmanliness. The evil Jews of anti-Semitic propaganda eschew violence: they attain their evil ends through their shrewdness, not their brawn. Far better to be feared than scorned. But then, I’m a Zionist, aren’t I?
November 12, 2010, 10:04 amBarry Youngerman says:
“non-German militiamen”, of course
November 12, 2010, 10:06 amMithras says:
This liberal opinionmaker owns a Ruger P95 and a Mossberg 500C Persuader, which I really enjoy shooting. (I’d also love to get a Class III weapon but don’t have $6,000, minimum, for a decent one.) Actually, I’m not much of an opinionmaker, but among the issues liberals in general that I know care about, gun registration is pretty far down the list. We just don’t care about that aspect. We do care when some supposedly “law abiding” gun owner’s gun gets used in a crime, and when the police question him, he claims it was lost or stolen but he just didn’t bother to report it. We like to know when someone “loses” a bunch of guns, because then we can see if they’re really selling them. Requiring all private handgun sales to go through dealers with a background check and that dealers retain those records accomplishes that goal, at least in my own state. It’s not necessary for the government to have a list of all gun owners (they’d screw it up anyway, like the TSA no-fly list) and liberals are pretty opposed to the government keeping lists of “suspicious persons” anyway (see, e.g., the Hoover-era FBI). No one wants the government to come and take my guns away. I know this is argument by anecdote, but that’s what you’re doing, too.
November 12, 2010, 10:51 amAlpheus says:
Well, this explains my hatred of parades! But I don’t see how #2 follows, because America doesn’t believe in German exceptionalism. America believes in American exceptionalism–and rightly so, only insomuch as America remains free. As soon as America falls into tyranny, complete with parades and German exceptionalism, we are ripe for regrets when we sit in our concentration camps.
November 12, 2010, 11:12 amBarry Youngerman says:
To Mithras:
Do you think the majority of gun-control advocates in this noisy debate act and think like you and have similar ends?
I believe my anecdotal evidence is more relevant than yours. I am the dirty traitor who spent decades hiding among the New York liberals, and am now happy to reveal what they say when they think they’re among friends. The majority of them think anyone who owns a gun is a fascistic nut, uneducated and stupid. They want to ban all private guns. They would prefer that police not have guns either, BTW.
You sound like a reasonable man. I’ll concede, maybe not the majority, maybe just a large minority. You still disagree?
I will now speculate: for many liberals, “gun-control” has little to do with controlling guns. E.g., a friend of mine (a more typical liberal than you, says I) goes ballistic every time the subject of stop and frisk under Giuliani comes up. But what else should he have done, I ask, to protect the decent citizens of poor neighborhoods? Well, he sputters, “gun control”! Oh. Yes, I say as he grabs for his heart medicine, HOW ABOUT enforcing our gun control laws by stopping and frisking?
November 12, 2010, 11:15 amAlpheus says:
Yes, it’s speculation about what Jews would have done. But it’s also speculation about what I would do, if this situation arose again. If I were to be subject to some sort of concentration camp or gulag, I will not go quietly into the night. If some other group is targeted for some sort of concentration camp or gulag, I will not let them go quietly in the night.
And, if I learned one thing from the Japanese-American internment camps, it is this: it can happen here!
November 12, 2010, 11:24 amAlpheus says:
Yes. And my grandpa should have been there–in theory, at least, because in fact, he may not have been geographically available at the time–to defend the Japanese-Americans as as well.
This is a lesson I have been determined to learn. I don’t know what I could have done to help, but it’s something I think about on a regular basis.
November 12, 2010, 11:41 amAlpheus says:
Yes, Muslims should be arming themselves, and to the teeth, for that matter. Every minority should be doing so, too.
And it should be remembered that the smallest minority is the individual.
November 12, 2010, 11:53 ambuddy larsen says:
Mithras, the concern with the renegade private gun mischief is with a low-probability / high consequence event (like a shark attack). The error i see in your position is that you’re applying this sort of event to yourself or individuals you know, and wish to further lower the low probability.
However, the issue here is not personal comfort but national security, in the question of best practice to protect same from harm from both without and within.
IOW, without getting off into the weeds of blah blah: the cost of random renegade private gun mischief should be seen not as an eradicable item in the back of your mind, but rather as the price of insurance against a low probability / high consequence event that actually happened to the civilized heart of Europe, within current living memory.
In Larry McMurtry’s (probably borrowed) line from Lonesome Dove, as one character was giving a .45 Peacemaker to another, “…better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.”
November 12, 2010, 12:37 pmNathan Shapiro says:
Two points come to mind reading some of the shock and awe some of these posters are expressing in response to the lessons of the Nazi regime.
First, yes, there is a small chance America will become a dictatorial regime any time in our lifetimes. But even so, we don’t let the government come near as close to violating the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eight, Fourteenth, Fifteenth Amendments. Why is the Second Amendment subject to less interest in protecting?
Second, this isn’t ancient history that only took place across an ocean. It hasn’t been more than 50 years in America that we treated a huge portion of the population as second class citizens, failing to afford them the same legal protections as the rest of the citizenry. African Americans in the South, you’d better believe, cherished their right to bear arms, not against the government, but against the people who the government—purposefully—decided not to protect them against.
November 12, 2010, 1:03 pmbuddy larsen says:
–nobody wants to be car jacked by an armed crack head, but the hundred year odds are at least 100,000 to 1 that before that happens, you’ll be murdered by a totalitarian government.
November 12, 2010, 1:06 pmmack says:
The internment of Japanese citizens during WWII was unconstitutional and a crime – do citizens have a right or a duty to resist the government when the government engages in unconstitutional and criminal behavior? Resistance is a progression – speaking out against it, organizing to resist it, writing letters to papers and congressmen against it, filing court cases to block it, attempting to raise public opinion against it, practicing passive resistance and/or use of non-lethal force, and finally if all else fails using lethal force and armed resistance.
The case can be made that if the Japanese citizens had been armed and trained in the use of arms, organized, and had publicly raised a row with organized protests – letter writing campaigns and had made connections and used those connections with other organizations to raise the alarm – and had made clear that they would ultimately resist with force attempts to inter them – that the US government may well have backed down before the first shot was fired or after the first few shots were fired. I for one would not view such resistance as stupid or unnecessary.
But the Japanese Americans were not organized or well connected – were not generally well armed – and mostly went quietly after some protest. That they were not murdered as the Jews in Germany and Europe were goes to the reason they were interred vs. the reason for the internment of Jews in Europe – the US government interned Japanese citizens for wrong headed security reasons – and the Nazi’s interred Jews for purposes of racial genocide.
How should one tell the difference – when to fight or when not to fight? The implication in some posts being that armed resistance by Japanese citizens would have been an over reaction and caused more harm than good in the end.
I don’t believe that is the right question at all – and that to view it as such is to set the stage for future misjudgments that might lead to another genocide or mass murder by government. The lesson to be learned is that the people must be educated to respect their individual liberty and in their duty to stand up for their rights – whether the entity attempting to deprive them of their rights is a local thug or a national government. In other words to cultivate the mindset and understanding that basic rights are inalienable and that individuals or groups of individuals that attempt to deprive one of those rights must be resisted. Second that in order to resist effectively people must organize before the wolf is at the door ready to kill them or cart them off. Organizing by creating and joining in national and local organizations that promote and defend basic liberty (ACLU, NRA, local civil rights organizations, and specific interests groups based on specific rights and/or ethnicity or cultural heritage NAACP, JPFO). That must also include learning to use the tools of resistance – from the media, to the courts, to politics, and learning to shoot and defend oneself.
Given a base of support and the tools to resist – and the mindset to resist from the beginning – hopefully armed resistance would not be necessary as the cost of crushing the resistance and the chances of successfully doing so – would entail more risk for the local thug or the national government than they would be willing to risk – and if they did risk it then the chances of successful resistance would be much higher.
To make “Never Again” a reality and not just an empty slogan – the holocaust must be remembered – as must the mass murders in China, the USSR, Cambodia, Uganda, and all the others in this past century and through out history. And the only agency that can ensure that it never happens again are the people themselves taking responsibility by standing up for their and their fellow citizen’s rights – and by organizing and defending all their rights – and by having and using the means to do so – including armed resistance should it come to that.
Lastly, the idea that the modern US military could easily defeat dedicated citizens only armed with small arms because of their vastly superior technology is laughable and shows a complete ignorance of asymmetrical or guerilla warfare. God forbid such should ever happen – and I will do all in my power to ensure that it never does – but in brief: the US military has the capability to engage and destroy in short order any conventional military force arrayed against it – the training – the coordination – leadership – and technology of the US military would without a doubt carry the day on any conventional battlefield with relative ease and would even prevail in most typical guerilla ambush assaults. That said – a real domestic conflict of any duration within the United States would pose so many problems for the US military that they would be almost fated to fail. First, there is the problem of domestic support – even a sizable minority sympathetically supporting the rebels is a problem and military action that results in the death of innocents will only lead to a greater loss of popular support which should it grow into a majority would doom the government to fall. No government can long stand with a majority of its citizens opposed to it – people will talk – resist – support resistance – and the government will be deprived of a population from which to draw its military men and women and its domestic police forces. Additionally a war waged in the US against US citizens would lead to disaffection within the military itself. Eventually there would be no one the government could trust and no one would trust the government and it would fall – as there would be fewer and fewer willing to follow orders. The writing would be on the wall and defectors from the government would cascade – with no one wanting to be a “government war criminal” stuck with claiming that they were just following orders.
The high tech weapons? The nukes? With rebels sniping from within occupied city apartment buildings – engaging in hit and run tactics – attacking targets of opportunity (politicians in unguarded or exposed moments, tanks or planes on the ground or awaiting maintenance or repair, tank crews or pilots or officers on leave) what use would they mostly be? Take out a sniper in an apartment building with a drone or a smart bomb and how many new converts have you created with personal animus against the government? Are you going to nuke Chicago killing thousands of rebels and millions of innocents? How long would the government stand? How much do those high tech bombs and drones cost? Do you have enough to sustain a fight across the entire country? Can you replace the high tech weapons you use, with the rebels and their sympathizers surrounding and within all those industries that manufacture them. Can you put enough boots on the ground to effectively protect all the government military bases, the politicians, the police stations, the support and manufacturing industries that create and provide the ammunition, fuel, electricity, airplanes, helicopters, food, sanitation, medical installations, smart bombs, drones, that you need to remain an effective force? Can you continue to develop and train new loyal recruits for the military and the police? Can you even effectively retain those you have? Would you trust calling up the national guard for support – and would they respond – how many of those called would come with chaos in the streets? How many police left their jobs in Katrina to see to their families?
If there is American exceptionalism is it because of a shared belief in natural and inalienable rights – a belief that the government is only legitimate when it is not destructive to the ends of liberty – a belief that individuals have the right and the duty to overthrow a government when it becomes destructive to those ends – and to do so by force of arms when that is the only means left to depose such a government if it has become tyrannical. There are lines in the sand that a legitimate government must not cross else it become illegitimate – freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship, freedom of the press, free elections, the right to vote, the right to property, and the right to keep and bear arms.
Of course the real threat of tyranny in this country is not the sudden rise of a single charismatic politician with an appetite for power and an agenda for tyranny, it is the slow erosion of freedoms one slice at a time – for the safety and good of the general public – it is the ceding bit by bit of essential liberties for “necessary” government oversight and protection. It is secret lists of potentially “dangerous citizens” – it is banning assault weapons, cheap handguns, registration lists of guns and gun owners, speech codes and hate speech laws, mental health mandates that require individuals to undergo mental health exams to be approved to work or own a gun, laws requiring government access to all electronic information – health records, internet activity, bank transactions – laws about the use of private property – no worship services in a private home – no building a pond or draining one, no planting a crop or raising an animal. At first such laws may be minor intrusions – but bureaucracies are created and then perpetuated and then grow – and then they lobby for new regulations so they can do a better more effective job – and they identify new “problems” that are “necessary” for the government to address. And if the government can’t address it directly they pass laws or regulations that create incentives for states or local governments or corporations to do so. All bit by bit eroding the essential liberties of the people – all sold with the idea and the promise that it will make life better, safer, and easier. I don’t have to get up off the couch to help someone in need in my neighborhood or my fellow citizens in the midst trouble – the government will do it – there are people paid to do it so I don’t have too.
November 12, 2010, 4:53 pmIt is the road we are on – and it is a road that will lead, if we continue to follow it, to tyranny – a tyranny for our own good – a tyranny of do-gooders who know what is best for everyone and of profiteers who hope to make money from it and of politicians who hope to gain and maintain power from it. And so the dikes of freedom that hold back the waters of tyranny are eroded – until one day when they are so eroded that they are but mere vestiges of their original strength there will come a storm – a crisis – and the stage will be set for the loss of liberty and the establishment of tyranny. And freedom will die with a whimper as we drink a beer and smoke a joint in front of our big screen TV while cruising the internet and we catch a glimpse of our new president with emergency powers and think how nice he/she looks as we flip to that new reality show on the trauma channel and think well I’m glad I’m not one of those trouble makers – hmmm was that a knock on the door?
buddy larsen says:
Mack, that was great –
November 12, 2010, 6:04 pmmariner says:
An armed society has tools to resist tyranny that are not available to unarmed societies.
Some Americans are determined to remain armed because we know something of our own history. See especially the events of 19 April 1775 (in Massachussetts) and August 1946 (Athens, Tennessee).
The first known gun control in the now-United States was in Boston, where the provincial governor (appointed by the King) demanded that citizens surrender their firearms so they would be unable to resist the Crown by force of arms.
November 12, 2010, 8:11 pmmariner says:
Really?
In the one case in very recent American history that is directly on point, it was the National Guard who went house-to-house in New Orleans, holding law-abiding citizens at gunpoint and confiscating their firearms.
November 12, 2010, 8:18 pmmariner says:
Right. What was that political downside, exactly?
November 12, 2010, 8:33 pmCarl N. Brown says:
During the Mississippi voter registration drive in the 1960s, Don B. Kates found that possession of firearms by Mississippi blacks (or their supporters such as himself) often deterred attacks by the Klan who knew their intended victims were armed. Possession of defensive arms by the targets of oppression often prevented attacks in those circumstances.
The idea is not that Jews would have shot it out with stormtroopers who shattered their windows in Kristallnacht; the idea is that the stormtroopers could possibly have been deterred from the attacks if Jews had retained the right and the means to self-defense.
November 12, 2010, 8:34 pmmariner says:
You’ll be committing a Federal felony by making a false statement on that form.
November 12, 2010, 8:39 pmKerr says:
I think it was more likely that FDR and the bigots who pushed interment to him would simply have killed them all. I think that reason played about as much part in this as it did in the death of Emit Till.
November 13, 2010, 2:51 amKerr says:
You have a very strange idea of what the word gencidal means, I can’t find a definition that includes that that.
The LA guard was acting as a state militia at the time not as Federal Troops.
November 13, 2010, 3:07 amleo marvin says:
Are you kidding? It’s almost 20 years since Ruby Ridge, and Clinton still gets excoriated for it. Can you imagine if when it happened he’d actually been president?
November 13, 2010, 3:46 amCarl N. Brown says:
A fourteen year-old boy and his dog are shot dead facing away from their shooters, a US Marshal is killed (and the federal trial jury accepts self-defense as a justification), a FBI sniper shoots one man in the back and shoots at another running away and a mother is shot dead holding her baby in one arm. And the downside to Ruby Ridge was …. that Clinton got excoriated? Funny I missed that in reading the DOJ OPR Ruby Ridge Task Force Report, Jesse Walter’s “Ruby Ridge” and defense attorney’s Gerry Spence’s treatments of the subject.
November 13, 2010, 8:48 amKeith says:
Mithras,
Gun registration only picks up the guns of SOME of the law abiding people who’s guns are actually a benefit to society. Those guns in crimminal or non compliant citizen’s hands never get registered.
Registers are notoriously unreliable – look at Canada’s long gun registry – not all guns are on it, not all guns on it are real, not all people on the register are either real or own guns. I gather that the ATFE privately admits similar problems with its records of NFA guns.
Britain – an Island- has registered rifles and pistols by make, calibre and serial no since 1921 and shotguns since 1988. Transfer of a gun required notification to the cops by writing within 7 days (24 hours if it was a dealer), the buyer had to have permission from the cops to buy a gun of that description and calibre.
Virtually all legally held pistols had to be surrendered in 1998, so all appearances of a Handgun in crime are from illegally held guns – use of handguns in crime DOUBLED in the 10 years from 1998.
Opiate drugs have been controlled since around the 1920s similar for cocaine – smugglers have little difficulty getting them into Britain by the ton consignment. I guess that it is simillar for the guns used to protect their operations.
At present, the guns are mostly commercially manufactured. Obviously that is the cheapest way – while they are available.
In making the argument that guns are not actually that difficult for an interested person to make from readily available tubing.
The examples of STEN guns cloned by the thousand by resistance operatives,under the noses of the NAZI forces in Europe and again, by the thousand during the British Mandate in Palestine convinces some people, but for one British gun rights activist, these examples were not carrying sufficeint weight. People were not believing him.
Phil Luty, therefore designed, built and test fired a submachinegun built from readily available tube and using only ordinary household tools. He wrote up his project and was rewarded with a 5 year prison sentence. His family members were subsequently arrested and charged with conspiracy, and Philip was politically “disappeared” for 9 weeks in 2009 under British “Anti terror” laws – the cops didn’t even have to say that they were holding him or where he was being held. The poor guy was receiving cancer treatment at the time. There are varying reports of how many visitors to his website were raided and searched.
As you can see, The point Phil Luty was making, that, even if registration could be made watertight and there was no leakage of commercially made guns – gun laws could still not be made to work – is not very popular with the mandarins.
November 13, 2010, 9:22 amKeith says:
Mack,
that was Brilliant.
Buddy,
if I can add to your figure of 100,000 : 1 for being murdered by a government versus being murdered by a crackhead.
In the 20th century you were more than twice as likely to be murdered by a government than to be killed in a war – civil – international and world war.
There is excellent further reading on quantifying “Democide” – murder by government – on Prof Rummel’s site:
November 13, 2010, 9:32 amhttp://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/
Keith says:
The converse of the question about American citizens of Japanese descent being interned has puzzled me for a while.
In my extended family I have Chinese (Manchuria) and Japanese (Hiroshima) relatives.
In the 1920s, one of my great grandfathers was offered a very interesting package to go and supervise the construction of steelworks in Japan. He wanted to go, but my great grandmother would not hear of it.
I wonder what his fate, as a white Englishman may have been, had he gone.
November 13, 2010, 9:41 amKeith says:
I’m slightly bemused by those who have inferred that insurrectionists would ever offer themselves as a target for conventional forces.
Just accross the border from where I’m typing, is County Armagh.
The Brits use their army to a greater extent (for its size) than any other army in the world gets used. Equipment wise, it isn’t up to the standard of the US, but it is still a first world force.
During the “Troubles” the republicans in South Armagh killed over 1,000 British soldiers, around 12 of the republicans were killed.
Don’t get me wrong, I do not support those thugs, or the “loyalist” thugs either.
To put the conflict it in its perspective, the active part of the republican movement probably never numbered more than 200 people. Obviously many more offered assistance such as safe houses, food, transport etc. Northern Ireland consists of six counties and has a population of about 1.25 million, around half “potentially” sympathetic to the republicans around half certainly hostile to them. The British Government even tried mass internment, but with one of the top ten armies in the world, with the funds of the fourth largest economy in the world, they could not “win” – neither could the Republicans – so in the end, negotiations had to take place.
That was six counties, on an island smaller than most US States.
Now, as a mental exercise, extrapolate that to the lower 49 and a population approaching 300 million, of which around 100 million own guns, add to that the impressive technological and manufacturing capabilities still hanging on in the US. The picture is a very bloody one indeed.
Although the molotov cocktail, the car bomb and the sniper’s bullet are the main tools of the terrorist, the IRA even managed to land home built mortars in the Garden of 10 Downing Street. The Palestinians in Gaza have advanced technology to the point of unguided rockets with several k range.
You do not want to imagine what a little bit of US ingenuity could add to that – for goodness sake, do not go there!
November 13, 2010, 10:48 ambuddy larsen says:
What is critically important here but alas must essentially present as a blank space fiendishly similar in appearance to ‘nothing’: the uncountable unquantifiable murders and political tyrannies that due to the presence of credible deterrent never got beyond evil fantasy.
November 13, 2010, 5:29 pmbuddy larsen says:
Keith @ 9:32 AM Nov 13; thanks for the excellent Prof Rummel link. Here’s one for you –Ward Dorrity’s Killers Without Conscience:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/698501/posts
November 13, 2010, 5:59 pmmack says:
buddy and Keith thank you for your kind comments – I just hope that people of all political stripes can find enough common ground to stand together for essential liberty and to oppose infringements of individual liberty from any and all political parties.
Keith, thank you for bringing up the tragic experience of Northern Ireland – the British Army is arguably the best trained or certainly among top one to three best trained armies in the world. It is important that we learn all the lessons we can from history – to avoid repeating it. Given the history of freedom vs tyranny – the phrase – it can’t happen here – sends shivers down my spine.
Surely we honor those who died at the hand of tyranny when we earnestly attempt to learn from their tragedy – to see that we do the real work necessary so that it does not continue to happen.
November 13, 2010, 11:29 pmbuddy larsen says:
…or as Lincoln made the same point, that the stories of those who have fallen in the struggle against tyranny is only finished when the living forget them, in concluding the Gettysburg Address:
…that from these honored
November 14, 2010, 8:00 amdead we take increased devotion to that cause for which
they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here
highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain;
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom; and that government of the people, by the people,
for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Keith says:
Buddy & Mack,
it’s a pleasure to have met you both here.
I’ll be visiting this thread for a few days, as I’m more than a little out of practice debating with antis. Whether they are genuine in their convictions or just behaving as trolls, There really is some excellent stuff here.
Many thanks for the Ward Dorrity link. I haven’t fully digested it yet, but it looks to be an excellent piece of writing.
best regards
November 14, 2010, 12:54 pmKeith
bud