The words of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn are as applicable to Jews as they were to citizens of Russia:
"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."
The Jews of the Warsaw ghetto did realize they had nothing to lose and managed their surprisingly effective uprising. That should be a lesson to people who think gun violence can be eliminated with enough restrictive laws. If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto could amass enough weapons to fight back while locked up and surrounded by armed Nazis then how could anyone possibly expect to prevent people in a huge open country like this from acquiring whatever firearms we want badly enough?