I think this is an utterly ridiculous comment from Carson.
Really? In what way?
Why? He’s right.
How can you say it is ridiculous? There is a holocaust movie, I can’t remember which one, where the people in “leadership” in one of the ghettos got their hands on some guns and ended up killing a few nazis. Of course they ended up being sent to the concentration camps, but that would have happened anyway. They were glad they fought. Imagine if the Jews had been able to defend themselves. Part of the problem is that they were constantly lied to, so they held out hope that things would turn out okay. Still, with guns they could have at least taken out some of the enemy.
Funny how all the liberals at WaPo hate this obvious truth.
I think he’s right...
Lucy, how did you come to this conclusion. How is Carson’s comment utterly ridiculous?
Really? Then why are tyrannical governments so careful to disarm the populace before starting their killing sprees?
Just for the record, our NRA coughed up a ton of hunting rifles and shotguns, gratis, donated by our citizens, to arm your Home Guard in the darkest days of WWII, when a cross-Channel invasion looked likely.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/650257/posts
You should learn the history of the Warsaw (Jewish) Ghetto in WWII and learn what a few dedicated men and women with a very few rifles and pistols were able to do.
You should read Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. In particular, I offer this quote:
“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.”
You should spend some time on Rummel’s Democide site to understand just how dangerous governments can be, and in particular 20th Century governments. So not that long ago.
http://hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
There are good reasons educated American own firearms, and will. Period.
You must be brainwashed in Blighty..
My grandparents came from Warsaw. This is what happened when Jews were able to get guns in Poland. Had they been armed early on, perhaps the Holocaust would have been different.
From April 19 to May 16, 1943, during World War II (1939-45), residents of the Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, Poland, staged an armed revolt against deportations to extermination camps. The Warsaw ghetto uprising inspired other revolts in extermination camps and ghettos throughout German-occupied Eastern Europe.
http://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/warsaw-ghetto-uprising
Since 15-9-20
I’ve read some of your give and take with others on this thread regarding your criticism of Carson’s point and I think you’ve missed his point completely. What Carson is saying is that the tyranny of Nazism would never have grown to be able to seize the reins of government and to terrorize civilians in the streets if people were allowed to own guns. No one with a decent knowledge of WWII history believes that the Jews would have or could have fought the Wehrmacht with small arms if they had been legal. The point is they would have had a much better chance of stopping Hitler from seizing control of the civilian government and, consequently, the military, which gave him the power to completely subdue populations in Germany and her conquests.
Carson’s point dovetails with the reason we have a Second Amendment here: to prevent politicians from setting up a tyrannical regime. American familiarity with firearms also did good service in both WWI and WWII when they came to bail out England and France. The doughboys knew how to shoot.
I don’t know where you get the notion that the Jews were pacifists in pre-war Europe. While it may be true that large parts of the Jewish population were not war-like people, they were not today’s liberal Jews. This is the point of people who cite the Warsaw Ghetto uprising: not to prove the Jews could have beaten the Wehrmacht, but to prove that, when given a chance to fight, they fought fiercely. Ie: they were not pacifists.