Best of The Zombieslayer

The Best of The Zombieslayer

Guns and Genocide

June 27 , 2005

If you haven't figured it out by now, I love guns. I love them for many reasons. I love shooting. I like their noises (heavy metal music, baby!). I like their power, I like their looks. I like the bonding shooters get. I love hunting. I love being outdoors out of cell phone range with a bunch of friends and guns. I love the sweet smell of gunpowder.

As much as politicians and do-gooders want to ban guns in America, they will never be able to. For one reason, there are anywhere from 250 to 300 million guns in this country. There's no way even a complete police state can get them all. For another reason, there are too many people like me.

I also love history. I have a degree in it and when I get rich, I might decide to go back for my PhD in it I love it so much. People could argue psychology and philosophy with me and make me look like an idiot, but I know my stuff in history. When I'm not hanging out with the Zombieslayers and friends, writing, or working, I'm reading a history book.

By reading history, I've done a complete 180 on gun control. In high school, even though I liked shooting, I thought that the government should keep "bad" people from having guns. I learned though never to trust a government, even one with perfectly good intentions, to decide who to keep guns from. If someone was a violent criminal, they should be in jail. Maybe if we'd stop arresting potheads, we could actually keep violent criminals in jail. But that's another story for another time.

The Weimar Republic was the most progressive government of its time. They banned guns with the "good intentions" of keeping them away from the "scary" people like the Nazis and the Communists. Well, the Nazis secretly kept their guns and the Communists turned theirs in. When the Nazis took power, it sure made it easy to round up folks and kill them. They didn't have to worry about getting shot.

Hitler understood gun control made genocide easy. He was completely aware of what the Ottoman Empire did to the Armenians early in the 20th Century. He also knew that he didn't need to ban guns. The Weimar Republic already did it for him.

Ottoman Turkey's gun confiscation program worked in three steps. First they required permits for gun ownership. Second, they had a government list of all gun owners. Lastly, they banned possession of private firearms. After they completed their gun confiscation program, they rounded up about one and a half million Armenians and killed them.

The Soviet Union did the same thing. Under Stalin, between 19 million and 27 million people were killed. Makes it easy for the government to knock on your door and take you away in the middle of the night if you're unarmed.

Mao and the Commies in China did the same thing. Same story. Now I'm starting to sound like a broken record, just with different countries and different numbers of deaths. With Communist China under Mao, I've heard anywhere from 10 million to 55 million killed. We'll never know the truth.

Remember the killing fields in Cambodia? Same thing. Licenses, then photo IDs with fingerprints, then confiscation, then two million deaths. Doesn't sound like a big deal until you find out that at the time, that was almost a quarter of the population.

Remember Rwanda? The Tutsi people were banned from owning guns. Sure made it easy to get hacked to death with machetes when you can't shoot back. Now, I'd readily admit that Rwanda is a bad example because most people wouldn't have been able to afford guns anyways, but I think you get the point.

I have no delusions of grandeur. If the government wanted me dead, I'd be dead. But try taking 250 to 300 million guns away from the population at the same time. We will never reach that though because the tides have turned and the anti-gunners are getting destroyed in the elections. As of last year, the formerly very anti-gun Clinton is telling his fellow Democrats that if you want to keep losing elections, keep supporting gun control. Some Democrats are finally starting to figure that out.

So, that said, when someone tells you that we need to ban all guns, ask them who they're planning on exterminating.

Shootin' Political Correctness in the head since May 2005. If you're soft skinned or weak at heart, you might want to try elsewhere.