If Guns Are Banned, Only Occupiers Will Have Guns

Gun control prevents tyranny – and, if heaven forfend, someone tries to tyrannize anyway, it makes it a lot less secure a business.

Conversely?  Gun control not only makes tyranny easier to impose, but easier to sustain.

Robert Verbruggen at National Review on the effects that France’s gun control movement had on making life easier for the Nazis.

The French started out so well:

The French came closer to having a Second Amendment than one might imagine. Indeed, they could have had one more clearly written than ours: Just a month after the storming of the Bastille in 1789, a draft of the Declaration of Rights stated that “every citizen has the right to keep arms at home and to use them, either for the common defense or for his own defense, against any unlawful attack which may endanger the life, limb, or freedom of one or more citizens.”

Alas, it was not to be. That provision did not make it into the final document, though a vague right to “resistance of oppression” did.

Vague, interpretable rights really aren’t rights at all.

As the French found out; political violence in the thirties led to gun control laws.“resistance of oppression” did.

An 1834 law had banned “war” weapons, essentially restricting civilians to shotguns, hunting-caliber rifles, and some handguns. In 1935, amid violent political upheaval, the government required the registration of non-hunting guns. Meanwhile, a French hunting organization estimated that there were about 3 million hunting guns in the country in 1939, when its population was something like 40 million.

Germany occupied the northern half and Atlantic coast of France in 1940, making short work of the French armed forces and taking 2 million soldiers prisoner in the resulting armistice. In France as elsewhere, the Nazis made it a priority to disarm the population when they arrived, hanging signs threatening harsh punishment — up to and including the death penalty — for those who refused to turn in their guns.

So the French resistance started out the war hobbled badly by the lack of meaningful means of fighting the Boche.

One of the movement’s biggest complaints was that the Allies were failing to supply them enough. And even so, one of [author Steven] Halbrook’s interviewees estimated that 85 percent o f the group’s guns came from airdrops, with jut 15 percent being guns that civilians brought themselves, often without ammunition.

The whole thing is worth a read.

And a trip to Fleet Far, if you know what I mean.

2 thoughts on “If Guns Are Banned, Only Occupiers Will Have Guns

  1. Who are the guardians of the constitution?
    It ain’t the president.
    It ain’t the congress.
    It ain’t the nine dandies that sit on the supreme court.
    The guardians of the constitution are the American People.
    What a great country this is!

  2. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 09.14.18 : The Other McCain

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