One R. Lane wrote in on March 31:<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter reading his March 23 diatribe, it is clear to me that Review-Journal columnist Vin Suprynowicz has not yet learned the obvious: the more handguns a country has in circulation, the more handgun deaths that country is going to get — not less.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe United States has some 200 million handguns in circulation, and the highest handgun death rate (per 100,000 population) of any industrialized nation, with the possible exception of Brazil. Japan has the fewest number of handguns in circulation and the lowest handgun death rate per 100,000.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf all these guns make us safer, we should be the safest nation on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thus endeth R. Lane\u2019s succinct submission.<\/p>\n
Wow. This really simplifies the question, doesn\u2019t it? All we have to do is look to see if we can find any historic examples where a government has banned access to handguns for a sizeable portion of the population, and see what that did to handgun death rates among that population.<\/p>\n
And you know what? It turns out R. Lane is correct!<\/p>\n
Back in the 1920s and 1930s, the forward-thinking German \u201cWeimar\u201d republic effectively banned firearms possession by just about anyone but the military, the government police, and the ruling \u201cJunker\u201d class, who were allowed to keep their fancy hunting rifles.<\/p>\n
The ban was particularly effective among the ethnic minorities, such as the Jews.<\/p>\n
Was this effective in keeping the Jews from killing each other with handguns? Yes!<\/p>\n
Later, when millions of Jews — essentially all the Jews in Germany and the German-occupied portions of Europe — were rounded up and sent to concentration camps including Auschwitz and Buchenwald to be exterminated, despite the fact that on some mornings the other prisoners were each given water and a piece of bread, while the Jewish prisoners were not allowed to either eat or drink — did the Jews kill anyone with a handgun in order to get some food or water to keep themselves or their loved ones from starving. No! They couldn\u2019t, because they HAD no handguns!<\/p>\n
See how well that works?<\/p>\n
Now, some troublemakers may point out they pretty much all died early and violent deaths anyway, so the MANNER in which they died \u00d0 the fact that they died of starvation, or by being gassed in the extermination chambers, or being shot with rifle bullets — isn\u2019t really as important as the fact that they might have defended themselves and avoided being loaded on the trains to the death camps if they\u2019d HAD handguns.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s hardly the point at issue, is it? Besides, what are you saying: That they should have disobeyed the lawful orders of the duly constituted authorities?<\/p>\n
The government took away their handguns, and — just as R. Lane predicted we\u2019d find — their rate of handgun deaths dropped to almost nothing.<\/p>\n
Or did it? At www.jpfo.org\/filegen-n-z\/survive.htm, Aaron Zelman, head of the civil rights organization Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, interviews Holocaust survivor Theodore Haas, who, as it turns out, managed to get himself shot with a handgun while at Dachau — more than once — DESPITE the ban.<\/p>\n
\u201cQ.) You mentioned you were shot and stabbed several times. Were these experiments, punishment or torture?<\/p>\n
\u201cA.) They were punishment. I very often, in a fit of temper, acted while the brain was not in gear. The sorry results were two 9 mm bullets in my knees. Fortunately, one of the prisoners had a fingernail file and was able to dig the slugs out.\u201d<\/p>\n
But this, as R. Lane would doubtless point out, is \u201cthe exception that proves the rule.\u201d In contrast, look at the trouble that was caused when a few surviving Jews in the Warsaw ghetto were allowed to lay hands on a few handguns on April 19, 1943 (a date which our own Janet Reno decided to commemorate 50 years later by gassing and incinerating a bunch of our own innocent women and babies in a church at Waco, Texas, for daring to possess perfectly legal firearms.)<\/p>\n
Those Polish Jews used those handgun to kill Nazi-sympathizing Ukrainian guards and take away their rifles. Then, with this slight increase in armament, they were able to hold German Wehrmacht forces at bay for weeks, tying up units that were badly needed by Hitler on the Russian front.<\/p>\n
Surely we can all agree that was a bad thing. How much better it would have been had those desperate Jews had not been able to get their hands on even a few handguns. Why, maybe then they would have marched peacefully onto the trains to the death camps, sparing everyone a whole lot of trouble, and not setting the kind of dangerous example that would encourage surviving Jews to go and successfully defend themselves against overwhelmingly more numerous Arab aggressors in fledgling Israel five years later.<\/p>\n
Here in America — where gun control has always been aimed at disarming women and blacks while letting good ole white boys keep their huntin\u2019 guns– we know all about \u201cuppity\u201d minorities who won\u2019t \u201ckeep their place,\u201d don\u2019t we, R. Lane? (See \u201cBitches With Guns\u201d at www.aware.org\/success\/bwg.shtml or www.gunowners.org\/wv20.htm .)<\/p>\n
We return to my friend Aaron Zelman\u2019s interview with concentration camp survivor Theodore Haas:<\/p>\n
\u201cQ.) Did the camp inmates ever bring up the topic, \u2018If only we were armed before, we would not be here now\u2019?<\/p>\n
\u201cA.) Many, many times. Before Adolf Hitler came to power, there was a black market in firearms, but the German people had been so conditioned to be law abiding, that they would never consider buying an unregistered gun. The German people really believed that only hoodlums own such guns. What fools we were.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt truly frightens me to see how the government, media, and some police groups in America are pushing for the same mindset. In my opinion, the people of America had better start asking and demanding answers to some hard questions about firearms ownership, especially if the government does not trust me to own firearms, why or how can the people be expected to trust the government?<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no doubt in my mind that millions of lives could have been saved if the people were not \u2018brainwashed\u2019 about gun ownership and had been well armed. Hitler\u2019s thugs and goons were not very brave when confronted by a gun. Gun haters always want to forget the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which is a perfect example of how a ragtag, half starved group of Jews took up 10 handguns and made asses out of the Nazis.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thus ends the interview with Theodore Haas.<\/p>\n
Other population groups who saw their rates of death by handgun bullets reduced after handgun bans included the prosperous Ukrainian farmers under Stalin in the 1930s, and just about everyone under Mao Tse-Tung in China after 1949 and under Pol Pot in Cambodia a few decades later. See these fine \u201cprogressive\u201d leaders\u2019 proud death tolls at the \u201cGun Control Hall of Fame\u201d at http:\/\/ecclesia.org\/truth\/fame.html. But not from handguns!<\/p>\n
So now we have some hard, historical examples of the kind of peaceful paradise that victim disarmament statists like R. Lane have in mind for us.<\/p>\n
As for whether Japan is a \u201csafer\u201d place to live than America, there\u2019s no accounting for taste, though we might want to examine a few other causes of death that seem to be far higher there, including \u201ccommitting suicide by jumping out of a high window while under interrogation by police,\u201d before embracing that particular system, whole hog.<\/p>\n
Personally, I don\u2019t think aiming to be the \u201csafest\u201d nation on earth is shooting very high. I\u2019d much prefer to live in \u201cthe freest and safest\u201d nation on earth. And this was indeed the freest and safest nation on earth, R. Lane (possibly tied with equally well-armed Switzerland) — from 1782 to about 1912, back when we were also the best-armed nation on earth. De Tocqueville wrote of his amazement that a single woman could travel the entire length of the Mississippi without fear of harassment in the 1830s; most Americans didn\u2019t even lock their front doors.<\/p>\n
Since then, crime has indeed crept upward, along with a lot of other infringements on our freedoms, our happiness, and our prosperity.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s changed since 1913 that might help us explain that? Can any of you \u201cprogressives\u201d out there help me, here?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One R. Lane wrote in on March 31: \u201cAfter reading his March 23 diatribe, it is clear to me that Review-Journal columnist Vin Suprynowicz has not yet learned the obvious: the more handguns a country has in circulation, the more handgun deaths that country is going to get — not less. \u201cThe United States has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2nd-amendment","category-common-defense"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-X","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}