Would-be tyrants all seemingly have one goal before the total subjugation of a race or nation. That goal is the disarmament of common citizens. One such notable tyrant was Adolph Hitler. But tyrants even closer to home have also tried.
King George tried to disarm the colonists right here on our continent. Some Americans think the Boston Massacre was the beginning of the American Revolution. Others think the Boston Tea Party triggered the event. Those acts served only to agitate unrest among the colonists but the action that drove them to arms was the edict from the king for the British Army to seize all the guns, powder and shot in colonial possession. The Revolutionary War started over gun control.
READ ABOUT THE FAMOUS RIDE OF PAUL REVERE and THE SHOT HEARD AROUND THE WORLD HERE
Hitler, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Chiang Kai-shek, Lenin, Tojo Hideki, Pol Pot and other tyrants probably learned from the British experience because they all took steps to make sure the countries to be occupied had strict gun/weapons controls to make their conquest easier and the subjugation of the people possible.
The essence of Nazism, communism and socialism has always been based upon coercion, not persuasion. It is always imposed by a few elitists who think they have a right to rule over all of civilization because of what they arrogantly perceive to be their superior intellect or vast wealth or investment prowess.
Progressivism, like its collectivist cousins socialism, Marxism, Nazism and communism, is based upon brute force. And they don't recognize individual freedom or personal rights, either. To progressives, only the "collective" has rights! But ultimately, someone has to decide what those rights are, don't they? So of course, the elitists appoint themselves to dictate what those rights are!
They naturally resent it when we remind them that our rights are inalienable - they come directly from God - not some tin-horn dictator.
Here then is how Hitler disarmed most of Europe before WWII began.
First came the Nazi Weapons Act of 1938 which included: Classification of guns for sporting and possible military uses; registration and background check; types of ammunition that were legal and subject to control by bureaucrats and age restrictions.
Then came a gun-control law aimed specifically at Jews.
“Jews…..(in the Austrian and Sudeten-German districts) are prohibited from acquiring, possessing, and carrying firearms and ammunition, as well as truncheons or stabbing weapons. Those now possessing weapons and ammunition are at once to turn them over to the local police authority.”
Penalties for violation were relatively light - forfeiture of firearms and ammunition and possible fines and jail time. That edict was signed by Minister of the Interior Frick.
The day before, Nov. 10, 1938, a much more restrictive law concerning guns was signed by SS Reichsführer Himmler, and the destruction of the Jews in Nazi Germany and all the subjugated countries of Europe was finalized. Even the New York Times on Nov. 8 warned the gun seizures were coming.
On the day the order was signed, all hell broke loose. Without warning and without giving people time to prepare, the raids began. Thousands of Jewish men were hauled off to the death camps and Hitler’s infamous “final solution” had begun. The “final solution” was the genocidal extermination of all Jews in German occupied territory.
Himmler, head of the Nazi terror police, would become an architect of the Holocaust, which slaughtered six million Jews. It was self evident that the Jews must be disarmed before the extermination could begin.
Finding out which Jews had firearms was not too difficult. The liberal Weimar Republic passed a Firearm Law in 1928 requiring extensive police records on gun owners. Hitler signed a further gun control law in early 1938.
Other European countries also had laws requiring police records to be kept on persons who possessed firearms. When the Nazis took over Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939, it was a simple matter to identify gun owners. Many of them disappeared in the middle of the night along with political opponents.
France soon fell, and posters threatening the death penalty for possession of a firearm went up everywhere. You can see one today in Paris at the Museum of the Order of the Liberation (Musée de l'Ordre de la Libération).
The Nazi invaders also set similar deadlines in: Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Romania, Yugoslavia and Greece.
The New York Times, speaking of the French said: “Military orders now forbid the French to do things which the German people have not been allowed to do since Hitler came to power. To own radio senders or to listen to foreign broadcasts, to organize public meetings and distribute pamphlets, to disseminate anti-German news in any form, to retain possession of firearms--all these things are prohibited for the subjugated people of France…”
Today our own government is trying desperately to turn off the Internet and pass draconian gun control laws - both in DIRECT opposition to the Constitution which they have sworn to uphold and defend. Hmm, wonder why?
While the Nazis made good on the threat to execute persons in possession of firearms, the gun-control decree was not entirely successful. Underground resistance movements launched armed attacks. But resistance was hampered by the lack of civilian arms possession.
As far back as 1941, then U.S. Attorney General Robert Jackson brazenly called on Congress to enact national registration of all firearms. Given events in Europe, Congress recoiled, and legislation was introduced to actually protect the Second Amendment.
Rep. Edwin Arthur Hall explained: "Before the advent of Hitler or Stalin, who took power from the German and Russian people, measures were thrust upon the free legislatures of those countries to deprive the people of the possession and use of firearms, so that they could not resist the encroachments of such diabolical and vitriolic state police organizations as the Gestapo, the OGPU, and the Cheka."
Rep. John W. Patman added: "The people have a right to keep arms; therefore, if we should have some Executive who attempted to set himself up as dictator or king, the people can organize themselves together and, with the arms and ammunition they have, they can properly protect themselves. . . ."
Not all the European Jews turned in their guns which eventually led to THE WARSAW GHETTO UPRISING
Armed citizens were hurting the Nazis, so they took the sternest retaliatory measures to quell any further resistance. The Nazis imposed the death penalty on a Pole or Jew: "If he is in unlawful possession of firearms, . . . or if he has credible information that a Pole or a Jew is in unlawful possession of such objects, and fails to notify the authorities forthwith.
"Even British citizens had been disarmed by their government prior to the war. With no way to defend the general population, the British issued a call to the U.S. National Rifle Association and The American Rifleman magazine to “send a gun to defend a British home.”
British civilians, faced with the threat of invasion and after two decades of gun control, now desperately needed rifles and pistols in their homes. America responded and soon Brits were organized into the Home Guard. Armed citizens were now ready to resist the expected Nazi onslaught.
During the past century individual criminals wreaked their carnage on individuals or relatively small numbers of people. For example: On April 16, 2007, a gunman killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Tech University; Dec. 5, 2007, a gunman killed eight people before shooting himself at a shopping mall in Omaha, Neb.; Dec. 9, 2007, four people were killed then killed himself at a church in Colorado; Feb. 2, 2008, 5 women were killed during a botched robbery in Chicago; Feb 7, 2008, two policemen and three city officials were killed at a city council meeting in a St. Louis suburb. (The gunman was killed by police); Feb. 8, 2008, a nursing student fatally shot two women and herself at a Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Feb. 14, 2008, a gunman killed five and wounded 18 before killing himself and on June 25, 2008, a worker at a plastics plant in Kentucky killed five people at the factory and wounded a sixth before killing himself.
SOURCE
These approximately 75 murders were and are a national tragedy. As were the tragic deaths of dozens of school children by crazed gunmen. But they pale in comparison to the horror unleashed on people by dictators and tyrants - by government if you will.
Hilter unleashed killing squads called the Einsatzgruppen in Eastern Europe and Russia. As Raul Hilberg observes, "The killers were well armed . . . . The victims were unarmed." The Einsatzgruppen, in less than three years, executed two million people between fall 1939 and summer 1942.
As this century has shown, terrorist governments have the capacity to commit genocide against millions of people, provided that the people are unarmed. Schemes to confiscate firearms kept by peaceable citizens have historically been associated with some of the world's most insidious tyrannies. Given this reality, it is not surprising that law-abiding gun owners oppose being objects of registration.
Yet somehow, as you will see later, during all the bloodshed of WWII, the Swiss managed to avoid invasion and provided safe haven for Jews and others fleeing Hitler’s hordes.
FOR FURTHER READING ON NAZI GUN CONTROLS CLICK HERE
Return to TABLE OF CONTENTS or click HERE to find out how the Swiss ignored German gun-control laws, stood up to the German Wermacht and remained neutral during the war.
No comments:
Post a Comment