Gun control: A Nazi legacy

The value of a bet is equal to the magnitude of the prize (or loss) multiplied by the probability of winning (losing). The most popular way of justifying governmental power seems to be the notion that government protects individual lives by maintaining civil order. But what do statists have left to say when government proves to be more a perpetrator than a preventer of murder and human rights violations? Do Americans underestimate the magnitude of the crimes and deaths that have happened at the hand of governments? Do we underestimate the probability that it could ever happen to us?

In 20th century Ottoman Turkey, government took more than a million Armenian lives. In the same century, Communist tyranny has taken 20 million lives in both the Soviet Union and China, the Rwandan government killed 800,000 of the Tutsi tribe, the Ugandan government massacred 300,000 Christians and political rivals, the Guatemalan government killed 100,000 Mayans, and the Cambodian government killed a million for, get this, being educated. Last but not least, the April 15, 1935 issue of Berlin Daily quoted the most infamous fascist butcher of all time, Adolf Hitler: "This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!"

Modern day American fascists claim that an assault weapons ban is necessary to protect us from criminal abuse of these firearms. The eight major genocides of this century should give a hint that government is more likely to abuse these weapons than criminals are. Criminals would have to get pretty busy to rival the 57 million deaths committed by governments with military style rifles. Referring to New Jersey's assault weapons ban, Joseph Constance, deputy chief of the Trenton, N.J., police department, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, 1993: "Since police started keeping statistics, we now know that assault weapons are/were used in an underwhelming .026 of 1 percent of crimes in New Jersey."

There is a group of people in history who held individual rights above the nebulous collective welfare. Individually armed American colonists joined together to say no to oppressive government. Leading revolutionaries put on paper a list of individual rights that should never be infringed upon by any government. In recognition of the fact that individual self defense is more reliable than socialized safety, the writers of the Constitution left the individual right to police protection out of the Constitution. Thousands of government and media sources will tell you that the Second Amendment is obsolete or was never meant to apply to certain types of weapons or certain situations. But little makes the founders' intent more clear than the statements that they authored. Thomas Jefferson said, "The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort to protect against tyranny in government." Now does this sound like a man who does not advocate the right of citizens to possess weapons of the same size, style, and caliber as the police and military?

Today, many Americans accept registration as an obvious right of government even though every one of the aforementioned genocides was preceded by registration and subsequent confiscation of firearms. Never mind that confiscation has already followed registration in at least two American states, and never mind that criminals are unlikely to register their firearms anyway.

Tax measures like the Gun Control Act of 1968 make self defense a rich man's right. According to John Lott, Olin Fellow in law and economics at University of Chicago Law School and David B. Mustard, graduate student at the Department of Economics, found that, "If those states which did not have right-to-carry concealed gun provisions had adopted them in 1992, approximately 1,570 murders, 4,177 rapes, and over 60,000 aggravated assaults would have been avoided yearly." But what good is the right to carry concealed weapons when only the rich have the resources to exercise it?

Senator Thomas J. Dodd wrote the Gun Control Act of 1968 with a copy of 1938 Nazi Weapons Law in his possession.

Did the colonists fight so that the real intent of the Second Amendment could be lost to a cheap argument that government has the ability and desire to protect us? Did the Jews suffer just so that Nazi-style gun control could live on in America? What will it take for Americans to wake up to the reality of seizing the right and responsibility for their own self defense? Another decade of taxing, fining, and locking people up for possession crimes and blaming guns for black market deaths? Another Waco? Another Ruby Ridge?

Jackie Casey is a non-degree seeking graduate student studying statistics. This is the final installment in her series of anti-gun control columns.

By Jackie Casey (letter)
Arizona Daily Wildcat
April 29, 1997