I have been reading some of the anti-gun people’s thoughts on the events in Egypt recently and a particular theme appeared.
From Colin and Andy Goddard:
If instead of staging peaceful demonstrations, Egyptian protesters been armed with guns, it is highly likely that the Egyptian military, equipped with billions of dollars worth of weapons supplied free of charge by our own government, would have retaliated. That would have produced massive casualties among both the armed and unarmed Egyptians.
From Brady Campaign board member Joan Peterson:
If things had gone otherwise and the military had decided to side with President Mubarek instead of the people, what good would pistols and shotguns have done against tanks and machine guns? I say, not much. It would likely have elevated the violence and increased the potential for deaths and injuries.
This theme bothered me but I didn’t quite have the words to express my discomfort. Then I found them here. This is from Reuben Ainsztein’s book Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe page 585:
The Jewish leaders, however, rejected the offer, arguing that if they behaved quietly the Germans might deport and murder 20,000 or 30,000, perhaps even 60,000 of them, but it was inconceivable that they should destroy the lot; while if they resisted, the Germans would certainly do so.
I fully agree that going to the street in a massive, anticipated to be peaceful, protest while being openly armed is generally not a good idea. I agree that making every reasonable effort to avoid violence is a good idea. It does not follow that the general population is better off without owning firearms the government is unaware of. It does not follow that once the government begins killing innocent people that non-violence is the best response.
The anti-gun people may be channeling the thoughts of the Jews prior to the Final Solution but the Jews hindsight is surely superior and it is those thoughts you should attempt to channel.
Joe another way to put this is; Quislings lose.
My wife and I started a reading jag after reading the book that the movie Defiance was based on (as always, the book far exceeds the movie). Start with Defiance, the story of the Bielski family. Then, if you like, choose from: In the Lion’s Den, Witness Voices from the Holocaust, Destined to live, Until our last breath, Fugitives of the forest. These are stories of fantastic hope, they detail just how tyranny works and how people with incredible disadvantage overcome that to thrive and most importantly why we must never step back into the mindset of security over freedom the way that Europe periodically has. For Quislings like Goddard and Peterson never again means nothing at all, they can delude themselves about the impossibility of stopping tyranny (even over time into believing that standing up as individuals is cheap or even wrong) but that doesn’t change reality. All that’s required for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing (or something like that 😉 and we need to recruit “good men” to counter the influence of people like Goddard and Peterson. -Boyd
I read The Bielski Brothers. It was a great book. I just looked for the others on Audible.com but couldn’t find them. I would get them if I could listen to them on my drive to/from Idaho. Thanks for the suggestions.
There’s a time and a place for everything. Clearly Egypt’s regime-toppling conflict never reached the point where armed insurrection was necessary, and that’s great! But what if the military had been more loyal and opened fire? What if they had started to round up the families of protesters and toss them into gulags? What if people had started disappearing and crowds were mowed down with machine guns? That’s the point where violence becomes not only moral, but probably necessary to save yourself if flight is impossible. A fight—even a one-sided fight—is always preferable if the alternative is a massacre. The Bradies can’t see this simple point because they’ve been personally traumatized by gun violence, but that’ll be their undoing; most people haven’t, and they still see the utility of defensive violence in desperate situations.
So the Egyptians were mostly peaceful in their protests – so what?
Is the peacefulness of the Iranian protesters, the Bharanian protesters, the Yemeni protesters, or the Libyan protesters changing the behavior of their government? Or will those governments behave to their own, previous levels of violence towards the protesters? I think the latter.
Why do you think we haven’t heard much about North Korean or mainland Chinese protesters against their governments? Yeah, they’re all in jail or dead.
One way to look at it is that there is a large heavily armed third party backing up the protestors. It is called the Egyptian Army. At seemingly every step the Army shielded the protestors from the government. When the government started acting up the army quietly said “No that will not happen” by moving troops in between the groups. Part of me hopes that this was the results of some many of the officer corp getting trained in the US and told “your job is to protect your people”. That is not to said that the army is guiltless. They have before, are probably doing now and will probably continue to torture prisoners. Also who knows what will happen in the next 6 months. Hopefully they will be as honorable as they seemed during the protests.
Point of order: the Egyptians WERE armed with guns. Instead of carrying them to the protests, they used them to set up night watches against looters and regime thugs — with the cooperation of the army.
When I went through Infantry Officers Basic Course we had a large contingent of middle eastern officers training with us. Only one from Egypt in my class then, but many from Lebanon. Now I’m training with an Armenian, Jordanian, and Bangladeshi officer. Many of the foreign officers have heard about the instructors from their peers who have already studied in the US. The Egyptian Army got its clock cleaned by Israel once and they have taken large steps to becoming a truly professional military force. One of the traditions of he US Military, that we are apolitical, has rubbed off on the Egyptians.
Of course operation Bright Star every year helps maintain those relationships.
Goddard and Peterson are both conveniently forgetting that their entire left-wing is up in arms about our recent misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan – here we are with the most powerful military on earth and insurgencies armed with AUTOMATIC weapons and ROCKET LAUNCHERS are giving us a hard time!
What good will “pistols and shotguns” do? Here’s a hint, dumbass – YOUR ilk wants to restrict other weapons, namely the ones I mentioned above! It’s your fault, not ours.
All that is required of a resistance movement anywhere, at any time is access to some kind of weaponry and a will to resist even though you know many will pay a steep price. Many of the conflicts have played out the way they have because the resistance knows the power that they are resisting has larger concerns in other parts of the world. If they are patient and willing to pay a heavy price, they can essentially wait out their much more powerful foe.
After all that is how we won our own independence. The British had bigger issues to deal with than the outcome of that pesky revolution.
As to some ( however remote) possibility of something along those lines happening in the future of our country, I forget the exact figure, but American citizens own something in the neighborhood of 40-48 percent of the legally owned private arms in the entire world. No RPG-7’s or stinger missiles in there, but not a bad place to start. Resistance most certainly would not be futile.
They also don’t take in to account the signifigant percentage of active military folks who are on our side of the ideological fence. I served. My brothers did, and my father and most of my uncles before me. I reject the notion that some future hypothetical tyrranical U.S. regime would get anywhere close to 100% compliance to orders to kill large numbers of American citizens.
And, right on cue, the word from Libya is that security forces have killed more than 200 protesters. Good thing the protesters didn’t cause the security forces to turn to violence….