Posted on 01/21/2013 4:46:12 PM PST by servo1969
In a recent interview on gun control in the wake of the slaughter of a classroom of innocent children and faculty at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Ben Shapiro said that one of the purposes of an armed citizenry is to prevent government tyranny. Piers Morgan harrumphed condescendingly in response, as if the very thought that Americans might need protection at this time from a potentially tyrannical government was wacky in an extremist, even paranoid way.
In the face of a relatively peaceful society with a government not waging literal war on its citizens, Morgan’s emotions seem understandable. Why do you need weapons against tyranny when the government isn’t attacking you? That’s absurd! Paranoid! But by the time an unexpected situation is desperate, even catastrophic, if citizens are unarmed, it is too late and virtually impossible to acquire weapons.
In the face of real tyranny, an unarmed civilian population is completely defenseless. History has shown us over and over again that events that trigger the collapse of a society, including all legal boundaries and ordinary decency, happen in the blink of an eye. Jews living completely normal lives in Europe in the 1930s could never have imagined that, just a few years later, their own governments (because several occupied countries were complicit with the Nazis) would herd them en masse into buildings filled with poisoned air in order to slaughter each and every one of them. The collapse was total and dizzyingly brisk. In areas of Eastern Europe it was overnight.
So here’s a question for Mr. Morgan: Once your own government, or a successful invading with which your government conspires, isolates you in ghettos, deprives you of food and possessions, and denies you any civil rights, including the right to possess a weapon, what do you do? At that moment, do you walk into a gun shop to buy protection for yourself? For citizens to have a chance at defending themselves against this overnight societal collapse, they need the gun before, not after, their government turns on them. Israel learned this lesson well, which is why the citizenry is armed.
As was everyone with a functioning soul and conscience, I too was horrified by the Sandy Hook massacre. It was another reminder (as if we needed one) that evil and insanity exist – and that, when mixed together, these two are a horrifying combination. Much needs to be done to help the mentally ill and to keep them away from weapons, and to help identify when their behavior is escalating dangerously so that we can react and get help sooner.
The question in terms of responses, though, is whether disarming our civilian population would make us more, or less, vulnerable and whether doing so would make our children more, or less, at risk. Reasonable people can logically accept the necessity of strict background checks for gun owners and laws about gun storage so that children, mentally ill people, and thieves cannot access them. But will eliminating guns entirely protect children? I took a look at the biggest mass slaughters of the past 100 years. This is what I learned.
Between 1915 and 1923 about 1,000,000 Armenians were slaughtered by the Turkish military by order of the Ottoman government.
Primary methods of slaughter: mass burnings, drowning, starvation, exposure, death marches.
Child victims? In the hundreds of thousands.
In 1933, Josef Stalin, leader of the USSR, engineered a famine in Ukraine enforced by the armed military. Between 7,000,000 and 11,000,000 peasants starved to death. At its height, 25,000 people died of starvation per day.
Primary method of slaughter: starvation.
Child victims? In the millions.
Between 1939- 1945 the German government organized the systematic slaughter of all humans they deemed undesirable. Their primary target was Jews, but victims included gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people, and the mentally ill. Those who enforced this slaughter were armed police and soldiers. After concluding that bullets were too expensive, the Nazis and their allies applied less expensive slaughtering techniques.
Primary methods of slaughter: mass gassings, mass burnings, beating, exposure, starvation, worked to death, buried alive, medical experimentation, torture.
Child victims? Between 2-3,000,000 children were murdered.
Mao Tze Tung, leader of Communist China, and the greatest mass murderer of all time, slaughtered between 49-70,000,000 people during the so-called “Great Leap Forward.” Forty-five million people died in 4 years alone in work camps and gulags.
Primary methods of slaughter: worked to death, starvation, exposure, torture, beatings.
Child victims? In the millions.
Between 1975-1979, 2,000,000 Cambodian civilians were systematically slaughtered by their government, the Khmer Rouge.
Primary method of slaughter: starvation, exposure, and, because bullets were too expensive per Khmer Rouge officials (“Bullets are not to be wasted”), death was delivered by hammer, axe, spade, sharpened bamboo sticks, and burial alive.
Child victims: In the hundreds of thousands.
Between 1984 and 1988, between 240,000 and 3,500,000 citizens of North Korea were starved to death by their government engineering and incompetence. Armed police and the military enforced this policy.
Primary method of slaughter: starvation, work camps, and gulags.
Child victims? In the tens of thousands.
In 1984, a government sponsored massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda led to the death of 800,000 people in one year. Guns were expensive, so the Hutus used other methods.
Primary method of slaughter: machetes, clubs, knives, bombs.
Child victims? In the tens of thousands.
The common thread to these mass killings was that tyrannical governments using armed agents (military and police) carried them out against ordinary citizens who were either entirely unarmed, or under-armed. Were guns involved in the slaughter? Certainly. As these pictures show, guns were used against unarmed people to herd them, terrify them, and control them. Guns were used like cattle prods to move large numbers of people and to frighten them into cooperation. Repeatedly, governments bent on large scale mass slaughter found shooting to be too slow and costly. The Nazis abandoned their Baba Yar-type ravines for industrialized death factories. Resistance only occurred when civilians were able to gather together weapons to fight back. Without weapons, civilians were entirely defenseless against armed tormentors.
Planning to deal with tyranny after tyranny occurs is too late. An armed citizenry is the best system of checks and balances against a government getting too big, demonizing particular groups of citizens too much, and lacking any meaningful opposition within the country. Tyrants always look for easy victims and seek to disarm them. A population that can and will protect itself in advance of a tyrant’s encroachments effectively prevents any tyranny from occurring.
[Bookworm here: I am willing to bet that, in everyone of the countries Lulu describes above, if you had asked people months or a few years in advance whether they would be subject to tyranny and genocide, they all would have answered, "No way! It can't happen here.]
The next time someone asks why you “need” a so-called assault weapon ask them why Rosa Parks needed to sit and not stand on the bus. The answer is simple, there is no requirement to show need in order to exercise your rights.
Bttt.
Not anymore. Look. I’m all against gun control of any significant level, but to think that in this age the citizens can or will rise up and defeat a tyrannical government is sheer folly. Just ask an Abrams tank or a drone. Toss in a mixture of most are talk and no action and, well . . . I’m keeping my guns but this isn’t 1776.
I have seen these stats around for the past few days, but this is definitely the most moving list because of the pictures. Sobering.
bflr
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Click here to visit the Oath Keepers Website -
Oath Keepers is a non-partisan association of current and formerly serving military, reserves, National Guard, veterans, Peace Officers, and Fire Fighters who will fulfill the Oath we swore, with the support of like minded citizens who take an Oath to stand with us, to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, so help us God. Our Oath is to the Constitution
Our motto is “Not on our watch!”
*Even if you have never served in any of the above capacities, you are still welcome to participate in our outreach efforts and may join us as an Citizen Associate Member. Read complete description here -
http://oathkeepers.org/oath/about/
You DO NOT have to be prior service to join as an associate member. We encourage all patriotic, liberty loving Americans to join us and assist in our mission.
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I only did the Iraq tour, but a lot of my friends here at Bragg that did Afghanistan will disagree with you.
“to think that in this age the citizens can or will rise up and defeat a tyrannical government is sheer folly. Just ask an Abrams tank or a drone.”
You make a very salient point about whether citizens would actually rise up to defend themselves, I agree it is probably doubtful.
However when you imply that even if they did rise up there would be nothing they could do because the government would have such heavy weaponry is much more debatable. In a different place someone made this same point, sneering at the idea that you could overthrow a totalitarian government armed only with handguns and AR-15’s.
I made this reply, I hope you won’t mind if I repost it here.
Seriously did the writer of that nonsense or the person who quoted him give half a second’s thought to such a ludicrous claim?
First off in a country in which millions of free citizens bear arms a totalitarian government could never take over in the first place as the party attempting to seize control wouldn’t get past the starting blocks.
However let us for the sake of argument accept that by some miracle the people woke up to find out a totalitarian government had somehow magically taken power overnight. How do they maintain control over a country where the citizens possess millions of handguns and infantry rifles?
Of course those weapons would be no use against tanks, jet aircraft or nuclear weapons, so no one would be stupid enough to try taking potshots at them. But those things require a lot of back up people, oil tanker drivers, electricians, food delivery men etc.
Can you imagine what a truck driver’s cab would look like after half a clip of ammunition from an AR-15 has been emptied into it?
The local gauleiter/commissar is going to be too busy doing his own typing and photocopying to organize the round ups and mass arrests after his latest secretary has again been shot by a handgun on her way home on the bus last night.
The maintenance at the secret police’s headquarters is going to fall into disrepair pretty rapidly after the janitors and office boys met a tragic end at their staff party in Hooters the other week.
How are you going to get staff to work at the state-run television center after its lobby has been raked by rifle fire for the third week in a row? I suppose you could fit bullet proof glass, sandbags and mount machine guns at the front door and escort the editorial staff in armored convoys but its gonna take the shine off your total state control and authoritarian image a bit isn’t it?
I suppose you could build massive barracks to house the nurses, porters, clerical staff and doctors who run your mental institutions and euthanasia centers where you liquidate those people who don’t have the correct ideological thinking but the doctors might get a bit pissed off about not being able to get to the golf course, not since five them turned up dead at the ninth hole last month, never bring a five iron to a .45 caliber gunfight as the gun nuts like to chortle.
And the state indoctrination of the next generation will be a bit slowed when the state teachers’ association have to hold their annual conference in the main army barracks this year. Well last years events at the conference hall were a bit traumatic for all concerned.
Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the near societal breakdown and chaos generated in Northern Ireland, the country need I remind you with the toughest gun laws in the world and policed by some of the best trained and equipped policemen and soldiers in the world, by a few hundred determined men armed with little more than light infantry weapons and handguns, could seriously posit the theory that lightly armed citizens couldn’t resist totalitarian governments hasn’t been paying attention.
Just ask Somoza, Batista or Ghaddaffi, oh wait, you can’t.
Here is a video a friend sent me. It is an excellent reason for the citizens to be armed. In the following case it was local, but with the Food Stamp President and his administration of corruption it is even more important to be able to defend liberty.
http://voxvocispublicus.homestead.com/Battle-of-Athens.html
Others have pointed out why it's not necessarily the case that our overwhelmingly powerful military is an absolute impediment to using our arms to preserve our freedoms.
Try to remember just how helpless the local authorities were during the L.A. riots.
I would also point out Churchill's brilliant words:
“…if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be 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.”
If it must be done, a way will be found.
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