…and of mass killings, and most wars.
It has been the thesis on this blog that disarmament has lead to more death by violence than any other single factor. I submit that such an assertion misses a critical point.
This is hard to put into words. Criminals, evil, exists everywhere and in all times. What separates times of relative peace from times of chaos and mass death then? I submit that it is resolve. A state of mind.
Tam recently spoke of a seeming dichotomy between Europe’s tendency toward docility or complacency and Her capacity for mass killing on a grand scale. I say that they are the same thing.
The willingness to go along to get along, the fear of making waves, the unwillingness to stand up and draw a line in the sand, and more importantly the lack of understanding or embracing of basic principles…together, THAT is the cause of chaos and mass death. Disarmament, while critical to the end of mass killing, and being a virtual guarantee of it, is but a symptom of that cause. The criminal element need but wait for the time to strike, meanwhile preaching peace at the cost of freedom. That includes the criminal element that always lurks in the halls and offices of government.
How else do you explain a thousand Jews guarded by a pathetic few Germans, while no one organizes a rush against the guards to easily overpower them? It wasn’t merely the lack of arms, but the lack of hutzpah THAT RESULTED iN the lack of arms. This is currently the state of all of Europe, the UK, and it’s becoming the case in the U.S.
I recently heard a phrase that will stay with me for the rest of my life. “The most powerful weapon of the oppressor is the the mind of the oppressed.” — David Masters quoting Stephen Banta
Intimidation is in the mind of the intimidated, not in the mind or the hands of the bully. Guns are only a factor in the hands of those who aren’t easily intimidated. For the easily intimidated, guns are pretty well worthless. Discuss.
Later we can talk about who’s the more easily intimidated, the self sufficient individual or the desk jokey politician with a team of interns.
I would like to offer that lies are useful in establishing this defeatist mind set, too.
Your example of the Jews guarded by a handful of Germans was probably helped by the lies they were told about it being for their safety, it was temporary, that the Germans were the height of civilization, and other pretty things.
Denial or desperation can have smart people clinging to slim hopes.
The deaths of millions of innocents by governments that had first disarmed them is not something that we should allow to be repeated. Gun control measures that reduce our ability to defend ourselves on a personal level or on the much grander national scale are inherently immoral. Just because someone is in government and making laws does not impart wisdom or benevolence. It often magnifies their sins.
Only my enemy wants me disarmed.
“Only my enemy wants me disarmed.” Braden, I’m gonna have to steal that one. It’s too good.
Even if that someone in government making laws does have wisdom or benevolence, that doesn’t mean his successor will. If a law is okay because of who is in office, then it’s not okay, because when the person in office changes, the law will still be there.
I’ve said things like this in other places, and there’s a lot of truth to it. Sure, you can say that if the Jews in Europe all had guns, then the Holocaust never would have happened. The real problem is much deeper, though – the long-ingrained culture of passivity in the face of threats. Having guns and the knowledge of how to use them would mean that they have the mindset that somebody might actually want to kill them all someday, and they don’t intend to go quietly into the night when it happens. But if they had that mindset, then they probably never would have been in the place of having to use guns in the first place, because they would have been screaming their heads off at the very start of the legal oppression campaign instead of sitting around and waiting until it got to the point of getting put onto cattle cars bound for death camps.
Then again, the actual history of the events makes things look a little different – Jews were always a tiny minority in the German population, like 1% I think, only a few hundred thousand. The vast majority of Jews that were killed were in Poland and Russia and the other eastern European countries that the Wehrmacht overran during operation Barbarossa. It’s a bit different when you thought that everything was more or less fine until, one day, a foreign army rolls over your city and a few days later, the SS Einsatzgruppen rolls in, takes all of the Jews out somewhere, and guns them all down.
“…the long-ingrained culture of passivity in the face of threats.”
Totally agreed. As a Christian, I often wondered why God would send Moses down with a Commandment that said “Thou shall not kill”, only to send the Israelites out to completely destroy various nations, sometimes going so far as to kill even the livestock of those nations. Until I did some research….that commandment actually says “Thou Shall Not Murder”, with “murder” meaning premeditated and deliberate killing of an innocent person. Wait….we have laws like that, ourselves! So no matter what King James’ intentions were, substituting that one little word as turned the Christian faith into one of passive submissiveness, instead of watchful diligence, and allowed evil to triumph in so many little battles.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Waco could be used as an example of an armed group that didn’t have the necessary mindset to employ their weapons in justifiable defense.
They weren’t trained in any fashion to defend their property and lives. I think their guns were, in general, merely talismans of safety. In their case, the presence of them, coupled with the fact they were building them for sale at gunshows for income, was the cause of their doom.
Koresh and his people were not expecting an actual attack, since he was standing in the doorway to talk to the arriving ATF when they opened fire on him. He was anticipating another chat, and possibly a walk-thru inspection by the local ATF agent he had dealt with before.
This led to the typical “chinese fire drill”, as the occupants ran around gathering guns and ammo from storage. Most, if not all, of the agent deaths and wounds can be attributed to “friendly fire” during this opening saga. That can be seen on video. Talk about keystone cops!
Koresh’s group had enough guns to annihilate the arriving force, and even deal with the choppers that also attacked, if they had had the necessary mindset. Obviously, they didn’t.
I chatted with some of the survivors of that atrocity. Yes, there were maybe half-dozen of them. Met them at a gun show that was connected with the ’94 SOF Three Gun Match in Vegas. Trivia: most widely seen bumper sticker in town, “Is YOUR church ATF/FBI Approved?”
Bear in mind, the media and the .gov (repeating myself) trashed Koresh and his group after the fact, to justify their attack. Can’t recall how many children they deliberately killed there. I think this exemplifies the often made statement by them “…do it for the children”.
The Kurds were armed too — but Saddam dropped chemical weapons on them.
Well it DOES make it easier when you’re a murderous psychopath, in command of an outlaw nation state, knowledge that the pacifists in the international community will do nothing but whine, moan, and rub their hands together, and the untermenschen are nicely grouped together in geographically distinct regions. Oh, and your opponants do not have the weapons necessary to present a credible threat to your modern, purpose built, attack aircraft. . .
On the other hand, once Saddam was denied use of the skies over Kurdish regions, that was pretty much the end of it. . . because, on the ground, the Kurds had the tools to resist.
I guess you think that civilian arms ownership is useless at deterring or preventing tyranny because you think that the US federal government will be using NBC warfare on entire regions of the United States?
That actually makes the case for not just widespread dissemination of private arms, but untraceable private arms, so that survivors of the first strike can initiate an assassination campaign.
Your view of what modern Western national governments will try to get away with if they go bad is even darker than most pro-2nd amendment types.
As Neil Smith puts it, “war is the health of the state”. Start with powerful government and the sky is the limit.
In much of the world — in particular, in Europe — powerful government has been around for centuries. The notion that the government (originally “the king”) owns everything and that “subjects” (note, not “citizens”) exist only to serve has been slightly softened, but is still pervasive. This is where taxes are viewed as money that belongs to the government. This is where there is no constitution (e.g., Britain) or only a meaningless one (e.g., Holland). This is where the right to bear arms, and indeed the right to self-defense, has been utterly crushed. This is where socialism, and marxism, and collectivism were invented.
When democracy means merely the opportunity to choose among a few different masters once in a while, and centuries of teaching say that your duty as a subject is to obey the authorities, is it any wonder that the sheep go along, when evil rises to power?
It took a lot more than passive Jews to create the holocaust. It also took the British, Neville Chamberlain type appeasers who helped to create the very war they thought they were trying to avoid.
It’s a process of wrapping up cowardice and a lack of principles into a framework of virtue. Europe is doing it all over again, only harder this time. In an attempt to appear “tolerant” and “multicultural” (the veneer of false virtue) they’ve invited their murderers and slavemasters into their neighborhoods.