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Nazi Gun Control
by Sean Gangol
[email protected]

Special to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

Ever since the horrific shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary the victim disarmament side has done everything it can to shove their anti-freedom agendas down the throats of all Americans. To their dismay, they haven't had much success in that area, at least on the federal level. Out of desperation the anti-gun side as well as their allies in the media have resorted to their usual rhetoric, which includes demonizing semi-automatic weapons or doing apples and oranges comparisons with other countries. Recently they have stepped it up a notch, by completely rewriting history.

Rewriting history is not a new tactic to gun hating zealots. For years they have been trying to tell us that the Second Amendment of the Constitution doesn't actually mean what it clearly says. Then we have the infamous Bellesiles fiasco, where a wannabe scholar by the name of Michael A. Bellesiles wrote that joke of book, "Arming America", which claimed that guns in early America where actually rare and few people used them. Despite this revelation flying in the face of hundreds of years of history, most of academia accepted it without question. That was until other independent scholars decided to fact check Bellesiles' work, only to find out that he had likely fabricated many of his sources. This was a grave disappointment to the anti-gun side, who wanted to use Bellesiles' work to prove that guns were not a vital part of American life, therefore there was no reason to have an individual right to own them.

Now the anti-gun side is attempting to rewrite the history surrounding the holocaust. As most of us should know by now, one of the vital tactics used by the Nazis to ensure the success of the holocaust was the implication of victim disarmament laws. Lately the internet has been flooded with blogs that were written by anti-gun activists and wannabe historians, all of which have been trying in desperation to disprove the notion that the Nazi regime used gun control policies to carry out their extermination plans. They act as if they are debunking one of the most cherished myths of the pro-gun side, when in reality they are only hoping that people haven't done their homework.

Bloggers, MSNBC commentators and even Stephen King in his essay "Guns", have all claimed that gun laws in Nazi Germany weren't much different then ours. Some have even claimed that the Nazis had actually loosened the laws. They do acknowledge that the Jews were the exception to Germany's otherwise liberal gun laws. Usually whenever somebody makes this argument, I end up face palming myself in embarrassment for that person. Seriously, do these people not realize how stupid they look when they say things like, "the Nazis didn't disarm the German people, just the Jews." So prohibitions against certain groups owning firearms doesn't qualify as gun control? Do they realize how idiotic they look when they try to give an argument that is undermined in the same sentence?

Another problem with this argument is that it seems to be based on the assumption that the Jews were the only people who found themselves disarmed. Maybe if these wannabe historians had bothered to stay awake in history class, then they would know that the Jews weren't the only group who fell victim to Nazi tyranny. Gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals and political dissenters also found themselves targeted for extermination. Some of the first people that were disarmed by Hitler's goons were political rivals of the Nazi Party. It is also worth noting that the weapons that they were the most interested in taking out of the hands of civilians were "Military Style Rifles." Sound familiar? Not to mention that the Nazis would also force victim disarmament on the people of every country that they conquered.

Some people say that the Jews would have been massacred even if they had been armed. I have two questions for these people. One, if being armed didn't really matter, then why were the Nazis so determined to disarm their enemies? The Nazis were so paranoid about their opponents having the means to resist that they even ransacked the house of Albert Einstein hoping to find an arsenal of firearms. When they didn't find the so-called arsenal they took a breadknife from Einstein's kitchen, just so they wouldn't come back to their superiors empty handed.

My second question is this: How many armed Jews were forced into the gas chambers? The answer is zero. If the Jews had chosen to resist, instead of submitting to victim disarmament policies, it could have led to an eventual overthrow of the Reich. Instead, the few who did fight back, did so only when the best they could hope for was to die with dignity. Even if resistance was futile, as Patrick Swayze said in Red Dawn "We're all going to die, so let's die standing up." That was why a group of ragtag Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto chose to fight, knowing that they would likely be crushed by the Nazi war machine. That was why 300 Spartans choose to fight the overwhelming force of the Persian army, instead of surrendering. That was also true of the people of United 93. Chances are those people knew they were going die, but instead of allowing the hijackers to proceed with their plans, they choose to fight. They all realized that it was better to die on their feet then on their knees.

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