As noted in the previous installment, the gun culture intensely promotes the false and dangerous belief that the Second Amendment was designed to ensure that citizens can wage war against a government that they consider tyrannical. Now we look at a corollary of this.
Dangerous Belief # 2: “Gun Control” is a hallmark of tyranny
There are two aspects of this belief. On the one hand there is the notion that any society that institutes “gun control” is, or is in danger of becoming, a dictatorship. Which is patently and titanically false. Nearly every country exercises “gun control” in some form or other, yet very few of them have ever become dictatorships. On the contrary, many of the nations with the strictest of gun laws (e.g. Germany, France, Finland, the U.K. and Japan, to name just a few) are among the most liberated and democratic of societies — and incidentally the least violent.
The other interpretation is that those governments which are indeed known to be totalitarian tend to have very strict gun laws. This isn’t necessarily false in itself; totalitarian governments by definition impose heavy restrictions on many things, so it shouldn’t be surprising if firearms are included. But it’s a mistake to exaggerate the importance of gun restrictions in particular under such circumstances. Dictators also, with great uniformity, practice censorship; yet gun enthusiasts and Americans in general don’t seem to regard this as being nearly as germane to controlling the citizenry as gun restrictions, though it’s actually much more so.
Gunsters are fond of claiming that “the first thing a dictator does is take away people’s guns”. Which, even if it were true, would not be particularly relevant to a discussion of “gun control”; contrary to rumor, there’s a vast difference between “gun control” and “taking away guns”. Furthermore, tyrants usually don’t consider either of them as crucial as the gun culture does. If you look more closely at the historical record involving specific brutal regimes so often cited as examples – e.g., Stalin, Pol Pot, Mussolini and of course the deranged little Austrian with the Chaplinesque mustache – you see some interesting patterns that the NRA tends to gloss over.
First, the dictators generally were not particularly prone to initiating “gun control” themselves; usually, they inherited it in a country where it already had been in place for many years. Why, then, didn’t the previous regimes morph into oppressive police states if gun regulation really is so toxic?
Second, the dictators may practice “gun control” – as virtually every government does – but they also tend to exalt and glorify guns as implements of power. Why not single out the latter rather than the former as a contributing factor to evil? (One answer, of course, is the passionate but mistaken conviction that a better armed populace would be able to defend themselves against such tyranny; we’ll address that in the next installment.)
This myth rears its daffy head anytime any government official advocates any kind of regulation of firearms. It happened just recently when President Obama proposed new measures to stanch the tide of gun violence in America. The reactionaries screamed bloody murder and insisted that “gun control” and tyranny go hand in glove – even though, as usual, such a claim was long on rhetoric and short on proof. As Vice President Joe Biden reminded us, he is himself a gun owner who must go through the same regulatory process as everyone else, and it doesn’t abate his freedom one whit.
In anticipation of the president’s moves, the gun culture launched preemptive strikes of paranoid propaganda. Among them was the circulation of new and old op-eds citing the massacre of Native Americans at Wounded Knee. Prior to that incident, the U.S. government had stripped the Natives of their firearms. So when the Army returned on the warpath, their victims were easy pickings.
Aha! says the gunster – that’s a classic example of how “gun control” leads to dire consequences. No, actually it’s a classic example of gun confiscation, not “gun control”; it’s especially typical in that it was applied only to a specific segment of the population. Genuine “gun control”, on the other hand, applies to everyone. Probably no mainstream American politician in the past hundred years has ever proposed gun legislation that applies only to one ethnicity – except maybe Ronald Reagan, who, as governor of California, embraced gun legislation that he hoped would keep weapons out of the hands of The Black Panthers.
Yet the profoundly silly essays conjuring up Wounded Knee parrot the official predigested gun culture rhetoric:
Ask any Jew what Hitler’s first step prior to the mass murders of the Holocaust was – confiscation of firearms from the people.
Not if you ask any Jew who actually knows anything about it, and certainly not if you ask any Jew who actually was there. As we mentioned in a previous article, the Nazis had been in power for a full 5 years before they introduced any gun legislation at all — and it actually loosened gun restrictions considerably. (The Third Reich was among those regimes that inherited a gun policy that already was rather strict.) And it wasn’t until later that year (1938) that they got around to prohibiting Jews from owning guns. Obviously a burning priority, eh?
By that time, the Jews already had been subjected to all manner of prohibitions, including where they could live, what kind of jobs they could hold, what businesses they could patronize, and what parts of town they could visit. Disarming them, then, was very far from being the “first thing” the Nazis did; on the contrary, it was more of an afterthought, a final slap in the face after the Jews already had been thoroughly dehumanized.
Likewise the Native Americans. Before Wounded Knee, and before they were disarmed prior to Wounded Knee, they’d already endured centuries of marginalization, exploitation and brutalization. When the U.S. Army attacked helpless civilians at Wounded Knee, it must have seemed (for many, at least) a natural and justifiable step in what had become a comfortable pattern.
Neither the holocaust nor Wounded Knee occurred because of “gun control” or even because of gun confiscation. Neither occurred because one side was armed and the other wasn’t. Both occurred because one side had severely and completely dehumanized the other. And guns do nothing to rectify such a lopsided and callous mindset. If anything, they only make it worse.
