The left loves snickering at conservatives’ contention that the Second Amendment was written to allow citizens to protect themselves against government tyranny. But when a gun rights supporter raises an example of such a case, they become hysterically offended and call him an ignorant crackpot.
In the wake of the recent mass shooting at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon, presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson noted to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that people in gun-free zones are sitting ducks for criminals. Responding to a question about a quote in his recent book, Carson opined that the Jews in Nazi Germany might have been able to defend themselves better against Hitler’s thugs if the dictator hadn’t systematically disarmed them. Carson stated, “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.”
The left went crazy and called Carson delusional, ideological, and cold-hearted. Carson refused to retract his statement—dismissing, for example, a complaint from Anti-Defamation League National Director Jonathan Greenblatt as “total foolishness.”
In Carson’s defense, Greenblatt’s response to his statement was, objectively, total foolishness. Greenblatt stated, “The small number of personal firearms available to Germany’s Jews in 1938 could in no way have stopped the totalitarian power of the Nazi German state.”
Um, I believe that was precisely Dr. Carson’s point. Carson proposed that if the Jews had been armed properly, they might have been able to take steps to thwart Hitler’s advances. What Germany’s Jews needed wasn’t just a reversal of Hitler’s recent gun control measures, it was a vastly freer gun ownership culture entrenched long before Hitler took office. Had German Jews lived in a country with a centuries-long tradition of respecting gun rights, vigorous exercise of such rights, and a Constitution explicitly granting them the right to bear arms to overthrow tyrants, they might have behaved differently when Hitler’s brownshirts came to confiscate their guns.
In the absence of stronger proof of this point, how can the left nonetheless ascertain that Jews in Nazi Germany wouldn’t have been at least better off with guns? Were Jews safer under Hitler’s strict gun control measures because of their diminished likelihood of dying from an accidental firearm discharge?
And how do liberals explain the rationale for the Fuhrer’s efforts to strip Jews of their ability to defend themselves? Was it just a coincidence that he specifically banned Jews and other groups he wanted to usurp from owning guns?
At the height of World War II, Hitler stated, “The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing… [T]he supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty.” What exactly is unclear about Hitler’s statement of intent?
Consider a sampling of 20th-century tyrants who deprived their subjects of arms to weaken their power to resist, then went on to commit genocide:
- The Ottoman Turkish government abolished private gun ownership in 1911, then murdered over a million Armenians from 1915 to 1917.
- Stalin abolished private firearm ownership in 1929, then set in motion the slaughter of 20 million anti-Communists between 1929 and 1953.
- Nazi Germany enacted increasingly strict gun control laws from 1933 to 1938, then killed 13 million Jews, gypsies, and anti-Nazis between 1938 and 1945.
- The Communist Chinese government instituted gun control in 1935, then killed 20 million anti-Communists over the next few decades.
- The Ugandan government banned firearms in 1970, then slaughtered 300,000 Christians and political rivals between 1971 and 1979.
Our Founding Fathers didn’t have these 20th-century examples to draw from when drafting the Second Amendment, but they had hundreds of other historical examples to consider. Though mass production of firearms wasn’t widespread in this country until the mid-19th century, historical examples abounded of tyrants subjugating their people by keeping them unable to defend themselves via other methods (e.g., the pharaohs, the Caesars, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan). Even King George began confiscating weapons from American settlers prior to the Revolutionary War to quell attempted uprisings.
So the next time some liberal howls when you claim the Second Amendment was written to defend against government tyranny, cite any of the examples above and ask, “If you had been living under that government, would you have preferred to be armed or unarmed?”
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