I'm particularly sick of the ignorant Nazi references.
They should be condemned as efforts to promote false equivalencies and straw arguments; beyond that thy are wrong. By wrong, I mean they represent sloppy, inaccurate, badly revisionist history. So the images below are NOT about promoting this fake division, but rather this post and these photos are about pushing back against it.
And this:
The addition of Idi Amin along with Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot.
Here is an observation; one of these things is not like the others.
There are those who are trying to polarize the gun control argument make photos like this, seen on facebook, which are factually inaccurate:
Salon actually has a very good piece refuting this material. The notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.
In reality, there was more stringent gun control in the decades before Hitler was in government, long before he was anywhere near to any role of power or influence. Gun control for most people was subsequently repealed by Hitler, not initiated by Hitler. Gun control in Germany came not from internal politics, but from external politics, the Treaty of Versailles that ended WW I.
from Wikipedia, the entry on Gun Politics in Germany:
The notion that gun control was responsible for the Holocaust is a myth, unless you also believe that multiple national armed forces were less numerous and less well-equipped than Jews would have been with personal firearms.
The propaganda professor blog did a good job a while back, in Sept. 2011, elaborating on the factual history, documenting gun control laws which preceded Hitler by a period of years.
No, if you are against gun control, you're wrong, but you're not a Nazi or pro-Hitler (with the exception of those white supremacists who are - as was the mass shooter who attacked the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, but that is a more limited subset encompassing many of the extremist militias and other para-military nut jobs.)
Lets move back towards reason, and away from this kind of tea party bullshit that tries to make links to Hitler or to the founding fathers that are wrong, misleading and just plain stupid. Lets argue not only in favor of gun control, but reality and sanity. Let's de-escalate the military guns in the hands of civilians, and lets also de-escalate this kind of rhetoric. Enough of the assault weapons already, and enough of the Hitler nonsense.
Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?”
“Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”
They should be condemned as efforts to promote false equivalencies and straw arguments; beyond that thy are wrong. By wrong, I mean they represent sloppy, inaccurate, badly revisionist history. So the images below are NOT about promoting this fake division, but rather this post and these photos are about pushing back against it.
And this:
The addition of Idi Amin along with Mao, Stalin, Hitler and Pol Pot.
Here is an observation; one of these things is not like the others.
There are those who are trying to polarize the gun control argument make photos like this, seen on facebook, which are factually inaccurate:
Salon actually has a very good piece refuting this material. The notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.
In reality, there was more stringent gun control in the decades before Hitler was in government, long before he was anywhere near to any role of power or influence. Gun control for most people was subsequently repealed by Hitler, not initiated by Hitler. Gun control in Germany came not from internal politics, but from external politics, the Treaty of Versailles that ended WW I.
from Wikipedia, the entry on Gun Politics in Germany:
Restrictions imposed by the treaty of Versailles
In 1919 and 1920, to stabilize the country and in part to comply with the Treaty of Versailles, the German Weimar government passed very strict gun ownership restrictions. Article 169 of the Treaty of Versailles stated, "Within two months from the coming into force of the present Treaty, German arms, munitions, and war material, including anti-aircraft material, existing in Germany in excess of the quantities allowed, must be surrendered to the Governments of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers to be destroyed or rendered useless."[1]
In 1919, the German government passed the Regulations on Weapons Ownership, which declared that "all firearms, as well as all kinds of firearms ammunition, are to be surrendered immediately."[2] Under the regulations, anyone found in possession of a firearm or ammunition was subject to five years' imprisonment and a fine of 100,000 marks.
On August 7, 1920, the German government enacted a second gun-regulation law called the Law on the Disarmament of the People. It put into effect the provisions of the Versailles Treaty in regard to the limit on military-type weapons.
In 1928, the German government enacted the Law on Firearms and Ammunition. This law relaxed gun restrictions and put into effect a strict firearm licensing scheme. Under this scheme, Germans could possess firearms, but they were required to have separate permits to do the following: own or sell firearms, carry firearms (including handguns), manufacture firearms, and professionally deal in firearms and ammunition. This law explicitly revoked the 1919 Regulations on Weapons Ownership, which had banned all firearms possession.
Stephen Halbrook writes about the German gun restriction laws in the 1919-1928 period, "Within a decade, Germany had gone from a brutal firearms seizure policy which, in times of unrest, entailed selective yet immediate execution for mere possession of a firearm, to a modern, comprehensive gun control law."[3]
The 1938 German Weapons Act
The 1938 German Weapons Act, the precursor of the current weapons law, superseded the 1928 law. As under the 1928 law, citizens were required to have a permit to carry a firearm and a separate permit to acquire a firearm. Furthermore, the law restricted ownership of firearms to "...persons whose trustworthiness is not in question and who can show a need for a (gun) permit." Under the new law:
Under both the 1928 and 1938 acts, gun manufacturers and dealers were required to maintain records with information about who purchased guns and the guns' serial numbers. These records were to be delivered to a police authority for inspection at the end of each year.
- Gun restriction laws applied only to handguns, not to long guns or ammunition. Writes Prof. Bernard Harcourt of the University of Chicago, "The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition."[4]
- The groups of people who were exempt from the acquisition permit requirement expanded. Holders of annual hunting permits, government workers, and NSDAP party members were no longer subject to gun ownership restrictions. Prior to the 1938 law, only officials of the central government, the states, and employees of the German Reichsbahn Railways were exempted.[5]
- The age at which persons could own guns was lowered from 20 to 18.[5]
- The firearms carry permit was valid for three years instead of one year.[5]
- Jews were forbidden from the manufacturing or dealing of firearms and ammunition.[6]
On November 11, 1938, the Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, passed Regulations Against Jews' Possession of Weapons. This regulation effectively deprived all Jews of the right to possess firearms or other weapons.[7]
The notion that gun control was responsible for the Holocaust is a myth, unless you also believe that multiple national armed forces were less numerous and less well-equipped than Jews would have been with personal firearms.
The propaganda professor blog did a good job a while back, in Sept. 2011, elaborating on the factual history, documenting gun control laws which preceded Hitler by a period of years.
And the truth is that no gun law was passed in Germany in 1935. There was no need for one, since a gun registration program was already in effect in Germany; it was enacted in 1928, five years before Hitler’s ascendancy. But that law did not “outlaw” guns, it just restricted their possession to individuals who were considered law-abiding citizens, and who had a reason to own one. And there’s no reason to consider that law particularly significant, either; the NAZIs didn’t seize control of their own country with gunpowder. They used a much more potent weapon: propaganda.
Under their reign, Jews were prohibited from owning guns, just as they were prohibited from doing many things. And it has become an article of faith among the gun culture that had they been armed, the Holocaust would not have happened (that is, among those members of the gun culture who know that the Holocaust really did happen). But the concept of a handful of citizens armed with hunting rifles and Saturday night specials fending off an army is delusional hubris peculiar to gun addicts. On American soil, its most glorious day in the sun has been perhaps Waco. And we all know how well that turned out.
The gun culture is right about one thing, however. Hitler really did enact a new gun law. But it was in 1938, not 1935 – well after the NAZIs already had the country in its iron grip. Furthermore, the new law in many ways LOOSENED gun restrictions. For example, it greatly expanded the numbers who were exempt, it lowered the legal age of possession from 20 to 18, and it completely lifted restriction on all guns except handguns, as well as on ammunition.
Given all of this, it’s pretty hard to make a case that “gun control” played a significant role in NAZI conquest. In fact, one might well say that when gun addicts brandish Hitler as a weapon, they are unwittingly arguing against their own cause.Here is a more factual visual image of WW II European history:
No, if you are against gun control, you're wrong, but you're not a Nazi or pro-Hitler (with the exception of those white supremacists who are - as was the mass shooter who attacked the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, but that is a more limited subset encompassing many of the extremist militias and other para-military nut jobs.)
Lets move back towards reason, and away from this kind of tea party bullshit that tries to make links to Hitler or to the founding fathers that are wrong, misleading and just plain stupid. Lets argue not only in favor of gun control, but reality and sanity. Let's de-escalate the military guns in the hands of civilians, and lets also de-escalate this kind of rhetoric. Enough of the assault weapons already, and enough of the Hitler nonsense.
Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?”
“Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”
The Bielski partisans knew they needed guns, and kept themselves out of concentration camps. Jews in Warsaw Poland resisted the Nazis for 64 days using guns stolen from the Nazis. When the Allies wanted to get the people of conquered nations to resist the Nazis, they dropped guns to the people. The "liberator" pistol was dropped into Nazi occupied Europe by the hundreds of thousands. Resistance groups stole guns to defeat the Nazis....
ReplyDelete
DeleteYour analogy is meaningless. No "liberal" would suggest we don't arm ourselves if we're being invaded by a foreign country. Liberals would be the first ones in line. What do any of those things have to do with Bubba and Skeeter goin' to the gun show and buying some assault rifles in peace time when we have a perfectly good (in fact most powerful the world has ever known) standing army?
Welcom Shanon to commenting on penigma.
DeleteThe analogy is apt. What the gun control paranoiacs are expressing is to arm ourselves against our own country - or did you not get that part of the images?
When and if we ever have to arm ourselves against invasion, we can do that through our military; in point of fact arming ourselves is something that can only result in terrible outcomes.
Kristallnacht took place in response to the assassination of a Nazi in Paris over the nazi 'self-deportation' actions where they tried to make life so miserable and difficult that Jews would leave on their own.
Bubba and Skeeter should not be buying assault rifles because Bubba and Skeeter should not own military grade weapons, so there is no need for Bubba and Skeeter to arm themselves against invasion.
It is the argument made as recently as yesterday in MN legislative hearings - to oppose our own military and law enforcement - that conservatives objected to the regulation of assault and assault style weapons. Sudies done by other states, like virginia, show an increase in the use of these weapons in crime, and in particular, to kill and injure law enforcement. Since the ban ended in 2004, such weapons are used in 22% of crimes.
The reality is that so-called 'law abiding' American gun owners don't adequately secure their weapons from criminals, and they aren't all that law abiding themselves.
I won't be at all surprised if it turns out the old white 'Bubba / Skeeter' anti-government guy, Dykes, who killed a bus driver and abducted a young boy turns out to have been armed with an AR-15 or something very like it, when he was killed in a firefight earlier this week.
THAT is why we need to get these guns out of circulation.
Welcome A. Leach to commenting on Penigma.
ReplyDeleteWhat you leave out is more important than what you put in. The Allies didn't just randomly drop guns, they dropped guns to known resistance cells.
I'm familiar with what resistance cells did, and most of them did not engage in military style direct resistance, but rather engaged in sabotage and information gathering.
The Jews in the Warsaw uprising were minimally successful; I would refer you to the various scholarly works on the Jewish resistance and the Holocaust. Qutoing Raul Hilberg, arguably the pre-eminent authority on the third reich, from "The Destruction of the European Jews", making an observations that is supported by other experts:
"The reaction pattern of the Jews is characterized by almost complete lack of resistance. In marked contrast to German propaganda, the documentary evidence of Jewish resistance, overt or submerged, is very slight. On a European-wide scale the Jews had no resistance organization, no blueprint for armed action, no plan even for psychological warfare. They were completely unprepared. . . . Measured in German casualties, Jewish armed opposition shrinks into insignificance. . . . A large component of the entire [destruction] process depended on Jewish participation, from the simple acts of individuals to the organized activity in councils. . . . Jewish resistance organizations attempting to reverse the mass inertia spoke the words: "Do not be led like sheep to slaughter." Similar observations in their writings on the topic have been made by Longereich and by Snyder.
Most of the Warsaw uprising took place in less than a month, from mid April to mid May. Total, 13,000 Jews were killed, 50,000 more were deported. The Nazi losses were 16 dead, and some 80 wounded.
And let not forget the assistance the Jews had from the opposition in Poland to the Nazis, the so-called 'bandits'.
What people did after the war was well under way was very different from what they did before or during the early days of the war.
The reality is that Hitler did not institute gun control. Period. And had the Allies not allowed anyone in Germany to re-arm, either civilian or military, there would have been no holocaust and no WW II.
So, yes there was some extraordinary fighting eventually. But there was no arming of the Jews with hand guns and the occasional hunting rifle that would have made the slightest bit of difference to the progress of the Holocaust or WW II.
So your point is largely moot.
I can't agree with you more. I tend to refer people to the arsinal of fully automatic weapons at WACO and their level of success when the think they can resist some kind of "government takeover" with their home weapons.
DeleteOr ask the question how many times has a DEA officer canceled a raid on a drug house because they thought they might have weapons there. I'd say about oh... never..
And yet, that argument was being made by a conservative blogger friend of mine, very heatedly just yesterday.
DeleteThese people genuinely believe the revisionist history that gun control was instituted by Hitler and that it was directly responsible for the Holocaust.
The reality is that the attempts to drive the Jews out of Germany failed, the attempts to forcibly round them up and send them somewhere else also failed, and then the Nazis decided if they couldn't relocate them anywhere, now that they had them, they would kill them.
Violence from the Jews would have clearly led to the Holocaust occurring earlier, and that would have meant fewer Jews would have escaped it. What caused the Holocaust was widespread and very deep antisemitism, and the scapegoating of Jews that in many ways parallels the scapegoating of both legal and illegal immigrants in this country.
M. Leach,
ReplyDeleteFirst, welcome to the blog. Thank you for commenting, and thank you for doing so in a civil manner keeping the discussion about facts.
With that said, keeping things about facts, for more than the past 100 years the citizenry of any nation has been incapable of overcoming the government of that nation if the army of the nation has suppoorted the government. Furthermore, in order to overcome the government, the citizenry required vast support of at very consdierable minority of the populace to hide the resistance fighters, to feed them, and ultimately, to obtain military grade weapons. Without the latter, especially, those resistances have failed, normally failed utterly. Libyan resistance fighters succeeded only AFTER they received air support from NATO, Syrian resistance fighters have failed for the same lack of support. The Mujahadeen succeeded only AFTER the US intervened to support them and the Taliban succeeds only BECAUSE of access to weapons through and support from Pakistan's PRI.
Equally important, the resistance must have a meaningful numbers and support of local populations. The German people did not support the jews who were being persecuted. They permitted it, they abbetted it, they voted for it. Had the very few jews in Germany decided to take up arms, they would have been killed even more quickly. They would have been David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. They would have been John Brown - nothing more.
As well, the arming of the citizenry did not, for example, prevent the south from being defeated by the north in our own civil war. It did not prevent the Dutch "Boers" from being defeated by the British, it did not prevent the Chinese Army from being defeated by the Japanese - the Chinese Army was vastly larger than the Japanese. It is beyond specious to claim that arming the citizens of Nanking, who would have been untrained rabble, that doing so would have prevented the conquest and subsequent "rape" of the city. The Chinese Army of Chiang Kai Chek (sic) was far larger than the citizenry of Nanking. Chek said he could not hold the city, if he could not, with more and better trained, better led, and better equipped soldiers, how could an army of children and old men done so? It could not.
This whole line of argument is a fatuous delusion unfortunately. The holocaust occured becuase of the twisted mind of a few ugly, evil men, as did the rape of Nanking. The fact that government was used as a system to implement subjegation and cruelty is blaming a tool which was used. It's no more valid than blaming the guns they carried or the bullets they fired (as DG points out). Unless you blame the gun for the murder, you can't blame the idea of government and the laws which are part of its structure, for the evil men do.
Why not compare armed citizens to another American example - the American Revolution? True, we needed some outside help to throw off the British oppressors, but armed civilians made significant contributions. That's why there's a second amendment. Oaths of office recognize the fact that enemies can be domestic as well as foreign. Our government seems less and less concerned with our welfare than with its own. Our pension plans and our health care plans are typically quite inferior to those of Congress, for example. The government wants citizens to fear it enough to be docile. I believe the framers of the Constitution had had enough of that kind of government. They preferred a government that would have reason to fear the citizenry if that citizenry had reason to be angry with government.
ReplyDeleteRegarding Jews and Hitler: Jews were rounded up by small groups of soldiers, not the entire army at once. If every Jewish home had had a fully automatice AR-15 or two, they probably would have still been rounded up or killed on the spot. (Personally, I would prefer the latter death to one in Auschwitz.)But Germany might not have had enough soldiers to resist the armies of other nations as long as they did. If even half the Jews had killed a German soldier, that would have been 3 million fewer soldiers for Hitler's armies.
Speculation? Yes. But such speculation is what often drives government decisions. I don't own any guns. But if I were a government official who wanted to take away people's arms, it's the sort of speculation I would consider quite seriously before taking action.
People who want to round up everyone's guns (and there are such people among the anti-gun crowd) are going to foment a civil war and cost the lives of thousands. And even then they will not succeed in preventing people murdering large numbers at once. There are no perfect solutions. Please stop pretending that gun control laws are going to make everything happy and peaceful and safe.
Welcome Darwin, to commenting on Penigma.
ReplyDeleteIn point of fact you misrepresent the American Revolution. Only about a third of the population was in fact pro-revolution, another third indifferent, and the remaining third was pro-England. The notion that we were in fact at all 'united' in opposing the crown is a fraud, and the notion that we threw off oppressors with
'some outside' help misrepresents the contributions of foreign weapons and personnel, which were not so much intended to help us as to use our efforts to harm the British in the larger context of more global conflicts between England and other countries, notably France.
What had more of an affect was that the British used tactics like those they would use against a formal european army, and we used the same kind of asymmetrical tactics that we ourselves are now struggling to combat.
As to your assertions about killing soldiers affecting the German military's efforts - how many German soldiers do you think were killed by the multiple countries the Germans invaded? You are making a stupid speculation here.
And as to the 2nd Amendment, THAT was about the disagreement between the founding fathers regarding standing armies or militias, not private firearms.
If you need factual primary source proof, here is part of the excerpts from the congressional record of the discussion on the adoption of the 2nd Amendment, referring to then Congressman Gerry, who later became one of our earliest Vice Presidents - and is also the same person who's name is incorporated into the term Gerrymander.
In point of fact, there are lots of free countries in the world, which have representative government, and where they have dramatically reduced the number of guns, and greatly restricted and regulated those that remain without anyone being less free and without any 'civil war', nor are we likely to have one either - that is pure bullshit. The reality is that those nations have less gun violence than we do, and no governmental tyranny.
So, clearly I'm not pretending anything about gun control laws making things better - they work.
Stop bullshitting yourself into a paranoid state and be more factual. Here is the 2nd Amendment Gerry quote, which very clearly shows what the 2nd Amendment was about - not private guns. Militias kept guns in public arsenals, and paid for them out of public funds. Private firearms were covered by other laws, notably deriving from English common law and including a duty to retreat rather than shoot people.
"What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty.... Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins." (Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, spoken during floor debate over the Second Amendment [I Annals of Congress at 750, August 17, 1789])
And while we are on the topic of possible civil revolt over guns - 1. there are no countries eager to arm you or to fight with you against the United States; 2. there is no evidence that any significant number of gun owners in the United States would support such an action, and arguably most would oppose such an insurrection along with the military and civil law enforcement; and 3. no such insurrection, including the American civil war has been successful, and you should think long and hard about the fact that the Constitution specifies the death penalty for treason, which it defines as taking up arms against the United States.
ReplyDeleteSo while there are a lot of blowhards talking trash, don't put too much stock in it. Their little revolution isn't going to happen, and if you try it, you are in all probability a dead man.
WRONG WRONG WRONG While minorities were banned from owning guns most white Germans were encouraged to own and practice shooting guns reguraly. I am in favor of gun control but you must be logical with your augments. This is just like democrats criticizing Bush by stating that the Nazi's invaded many countries. Do some research Ill get you started
ReplyDeletehttp://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcnazimyth.html
Your history is faulty Caleb.
DeleteMinorities may have been banned from owning guns for a few brief years under Hitler, there were still plenty of them who did own them.
I criticized the factual inaccuracy of those who make false statements and bogus equivalency arguments.
What the hell are you talking about "democrats criticizing Bush"/comparison to Hitler?
I don't need your cite; I relied on other sources that were quite expert, thank you, as historians. Your guncite cite is in perfect agreement with me, btw, not in opposition.