This is under 600 words. I’m dividing and abridging the essay into handier sections, starting with this one. It’s not final, just version one to test reactino.
So what’s the matter with gun registration?
Turkey did not enjoy a smooth transition from being the seat of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, through World War I and into the modernist Ataturk era. In those turbulent times, ethnic Turks, Muslims composing the vast majority of the population, considered their Christian minorities, especially the Armenians, to be disloyal and treacherous.
In 1911, a national gun registration law was passed in Turkey, with no apparent ill intention beyond increasing public safety. In 1915, during the Great War, these gun registration lists were used to disarm the Armenian and other Christian populations. Army battalions cordoned off entire towns and did gun sweeps. Once disarmed, the official state violence visited against the Armenians ratcheted up to murderous levels.
Only after the Armenians were disarmed and helpless to resist did the final step begin: the officially sanctioned and conducted wholesale “deportation” of the Christian minorities from Turkey. These “deportations” were in reality forced marches into fiery deserts without food or water. The stragglers who could not keep up with the forced-march columns were killed by Turkish soldiers with bullets, bayonets, and swords until the columns were no more and the “deportation” missions were complete.
Between 1915 and 1923, one and a half of the two million Turkish Armenians were murdered, along with a half million other Christians. (The Turks deny to this day that it happened, just as some deny the later Nazi holocaust.) But even after conducting this first modern mega-death holocaust, Turkey was not expelled in disgrace from the community of nations. There was no Western boycott of the new Turkish state. Adolf Hitler noticed this 20th-century indifference to genocide, and so did Lenin, Stalin, and other despots. It was an important lesson for future dictators, leading to even greater mass murders under the Nazis and Soviets.
And the Nazis and the Communists learned another crucial lesson from the Turks: national gun registration laws could be passed in the name of dubious “public safety,” and the registration lists could be used later to disarm selected minorities, and then subsequently to arrest, deport, and murder them by the millions after they were helpless to resist.
In the Turkish case, only a small clique understood the true purpose behind the gun registration and laws of 1911. If average Turks thought about the new gun laws at all, they probably believed they would lead to greater public safety, as advertised. That was also generally the case with the Russians, Germans, Chinese, Cambodians, Guatemalans, Ugandans, Rwandans, and all the rest who were required first to register their firearms for “public safety,” and who accepted the demand at face value as a “reasonable” gun control measure.
American liberals who would like to see the Second Amendment torn out of the Constitution as a problematic relic of a bygone era generally do not know—or pretend not to know—this well-established historical pattern. But American Constitutionalists, who are more often than not students of history, understand the pattern very well.
So, directly behind the insane faces of contemporary villains like Loughner, Holmes and Lanza, we see the smirking faces of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, tyrants who did not murder individual victims by the fives and tens, but entire populations by the tens of millions. And in each case, these national genocides were preceded by gun confiscation that was made possible by national firearms registration laws sold to a gullible population in the name of “public safety.”
Good. That’s a more manageable read for the intended audience of “tacitly anti”. Still a little long, but fits one page (anything longer and eyes glaze).
So this essay is really for you, Mr. Security Agent, because it won’t be elite Manhattan or Malibu liberals or Ivy League professors or politicians or columnists who will be ordered to strap on the sweat-stained body armor and enforce the new gun control laws at gunpoint. No, that grim task will fall to you.
The point is correct, but I think that this is rapidly encroaching the territory where it is the elite urban ruling class that will find themselves targeted. I do not state this to pound any drums, merely to point out that the pure demographics of the thing argue a bloodbath at an ill-considered pinprick. The Left operates by pinpricks, by pushing the envelope, expanding the borders of the permissible, and that has typified the decades-long patient push for citizen disarmament. After all, who wouldn't have agreed in 1968 that making mail-order firearms illegal was only a minor, negotiable step, and if it made Americans feel safer, only a small concession?
And so we have come to this, only this time the concessions won't be small and they will be demanded, not requested. The only answer possible should have been the answer in 1968: NO. We cannot compromise with people who are loudly, defiantly our enemies. If they send thugs we shoot the thugs first and then the senders. We need to set these rules from the outset so no one is surprised when the dead line is crossed.
And we need not to be out-shouted by the media. If we do not shout now, surely we will have to shoot later. That would be a tragedy of fantastic proportions.
I see the patriots, the jbt’s and a third undecided category. This third group will be in a tough spot, because while they are against tyranny they need a paycheck to support their families. Here I think could be the deciding ground in weakening the tyrant’s force. If God fearing men were willing to promise these third group to help them and their families through the tough times as they stood on principle and walked away from unjust, unconditional orders, the fulcrum could belong to freedom.
I would help such a man and his family, should he be forced with this decision, because it is the right thing to do and because to do so could save a potentiality horrible CWII.