It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong - Andrew P. Napolitano [76]
Give Me Your Guns, and I’ll Protect You
Government’s quest to strip us of our ability to defend life, liberty, and property is not unique to this nation. The Nazis used this method to disarm the Jews in Eastern Europe. Once the Nazis overtook a town, Hitler ordered them to seize all guns and other weapons from the Jews and forbade the Jews from acquiring new arms. Not surprisingly, Hitler exempted members of the Sturmabteilung, Hitler’s paramilitary organization (the “brown shirts”), and Nazi Party members from the existing gun laws. The tragedy during the night of November 9th through the early hours of the 10th, 1938, or Kristallnacht, demonstrates the success of this method. The Nazis unleashed a series of pogroms against the German Jews in response to a November 7th 1938 assassination of a German diplomat in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, by Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish teenager. In a matter of hours, the Nazis killed at least 91 Jews, injured countless others,3 destroyed 7,500 Jewish businesses,4 and burned 267 synagogues.5 The Nazis arrested about 30,000 Jews and transported them to concentration camps.6 The Nazis’ previous denial of the Jews’ natural right to keep and bear arms left them without a chance to defend themselves, their homes, businesses, or synagogues.
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In contrast, those able to hold onto their arms and their basic right to self-defense were much more successful in resisting the Nazi genocide. Take, for example, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 1943. Without notice, Wehrmacht troops arrived in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, with orders to liquidate the remaining Jewish population and transport survivors to concentration camps. Yet, to their surprise, they met resistance from a loosely organized group of Zionists, the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB). The ZOB never totaled more than 220 individuals,7 who were ill equipped to fight the Nazis. With only small arms and grenades, they were able to kill about three hundred members of the German military and hold them off for almost a month. More impressively, not one ZOB member was brought to the concentration camps; they either died in combat, escaped, or committed suicide. While there was no way for the Jews to know the Holocaust was occurring or about to occur, if they were able to maintain arms and fight for their lives like those of the ZOB did, then perhaps the six million Jews would never have suffered their tragic horrific fate.
Unfortunately, despite the widespread knowledge of the Holocaust, it is surely not the only case of dictators using the power of disarmament to their advantage. In fact, the Chinese, the inventors of gunpowder, are forbidden from owning any firearms or ammunition. In 1996, the Chinese government imposed a blanket ban and outlawed the private manufacturing, sale, transportation, possession, importation, or exportation of bullets, guns, and replicated guns. The irony is that as the Chinese government continues to disarm its citizens, it makes a fortune off the arms trade.8 In fact, as of 2009, China was the seventh largest exporter of arms in the world.9
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Why would a government making large profits exporting arms, prevent its people from owning these arms? The answer is simple: To retain power. As Mao Zedong famously remarked, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” A disarmed citizenry allows China’s growing military to maintain the status quo; a status quo involving complete governmental dominance of all non-government persons. In fact, the timing of the blanket prohibition is evidence of this. The Chinese government initiated the prohibition after political unrest and social tensions rose with pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989.
Unfortunately, despite what we are taught, our own nation’s history in the realm of gun laws is more similar to Eastern Europe’s and China’s