Many advocates of gun rights in the US will argue that had people had access to guns in Nazi Germany, it would have better enabled people to resist the tyranny of the government and maybe resist the holocaust.
Below is a link to the Wikipedia page on the theory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_gun_control_theory
The Nazis have become the standard measure of evil by which we judge all our actions. It is the measure of the moral catastrophe of the twentieth century, and is used as a warning against complacency and support for restricting civil liberties. It does not take much to agree that national socialism brought out the absolute worst in people. It seems only reasonable to believe that people should have resisted it.
Sadly, this betrays a certain nievity. We believe we are the "good guys", and take it as self evident that our capacity for moral judgement based on empathy and reason is sufficient to resist a government. but moral courage of this sort is rare, as it involves not simply conviction but a willingness to act on those convictions in the face of friends, family members, authority figures and the more nebulous "public opinion" which is made to give at least verbal support to totalitarian governments. Active resistance is suicide: it is not a rational decision, nor a simple reflection of self-interest. We all want to be heroes, but who chooses to be universally condemned as the villain in the hope that history may yet redeem and vindicate their actions?
The suicidal nature of such resistance betrays the fact that gun control is not an obstacle to resistence. By trying to overthrow a government, you are already by definition beyond the law- so gun control only makes it harder to achieve the objective but does not prevent it. "Terrorists" don't need guns; they will use any weapons they have at hand, such as bombs made with a fairly basic understanding of chemistry. They improvise. They take what they have at hand. That's what makes preventing and detecting terrorism so difficult and why governments tell us we need to sacrifice our liberties for greater security, that loss of privacy is better so that the government may watch for behaviour it deems "suspicious". When trying to find a needle in a haystack, you better hope the metaphorical needle does something stupid to give themselves away. The fact we don't know if, when and who is a "terrorist"- makes the paranoia and fear all the more pervasive.
As much as we would like to believe we are individuals, our behaviour is dependent on our social context. Studies such as the Milgrum experiment or Stanford University prison experiment amply demonstrate that human beings are far more willing to submit to authority figures than to rebel against them. For the most part, regimes such as Nazi Germany rely on only a handful of people to carry out their atrocities. They are not powerful in terms of numbers, but in initiative, having access to the resources and man power of a state. The reason such governments were allowed to stand up was not necessarily because they were brutal or cruel, but because a majority of the population were wilfully compliant and indifferent to the governments actions. Even the founding fathers recognised that; "mankind is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right them by abolishing the forms [of government] to which they are accustomed."
We condemn the Nazis and try to draw lessons from history. We argue that gun ownership is necessary to protect us from the threat of a tyrannical government and a necessary precondition to defend individual liberty. We don't want to live in a world where gangs of thugs can set fire to synagogues or break the shop windows of Jewish businesses, where the government can break down the door of people's homes and put people into cattle trains destined for "re-location" somewhere in Poland.
But whilst we may fear the power of the few to commit such violence, history was decided by the silent majority watching-albeit uneasily- their Jewish neighbours being loaded onto the backs of trucks to be taken to ghettos. It was this silent majority that allowed these things to happen, admittedly out of credulity of the lie too big, too preposterous to be questioned that this was necessary for the defence of the people. What would they have made of FDRs speech that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to turn retreats into advance"?
My point, is that we have to weigh our fear of tyrannical government and our inability to have access to weapons in that eventualityagainst the indifference to gun violence that lives should be sacrificed for Liberty. The sucicidal nature of resistance is unforgiving, but only because of the indifference of a majority that enables those abuses to continue.
In the debate over gun control we have to contend with a nameless, unreasoning terror at the government that necessitates gun rights often without the capacity for suicide that marks resistance against it, the paralysis of gun control advocates who are indifferent to the risks of tranny or the silent, indifference that deaths by gun violence are the price of Liberty?
The question I would ask is Which one most enables the violence of tyranny?
Below is a link to the Wikipedia page on the theory: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_gun_control_theory
The Nazis have become the standard measure of evil by which we judge all our actions. It is the measure of the moral catastrophe of the twentieth century, and is used as a warning against complacency and support for restricting civil liberties. It does not take much to agree that national socialism brought out the absolute worst in people. It seems only reasonable to believe that people should have resisted it.
Sadly, this betrays a certain nievity. We believe we are the "good guys", and take it as self evident that our capacity for moral judgement based on empathy and reason is sufficient to resist a government. but moral courage of this sort is rare, as it involves not simply conviction but a willingness to act on those convictions in the face of friends, family members, authority figures and the more nebulous "public opinion" which is made to give at least verbal support to totalitarian governments. Active resistance is suicide: it is not a rational decision, nor a simple reflection of self-interest. We all want to be heroes, but who chooses to be universally condemned as the villain in the hope that history may yet redeem and vindicate their actions?
The suicidal nature of such resistance betrays the fact that gun control is not an obstacle to resistence. By trying to overthrow a government, you are already by definition beyond the law- so gun control only makes it harder to achieve the objective but does not prevent it. "Terrorists" don't need guns; they will use any weapons they have at hand, such as bombs made with a fairly basic understanding of chemistry. They improvise. They take what they have at hand. That's what makes preventing and detecting terrorism so difficult and why governments tell us we need to sacrifice our liberties for greater security, that loss of privacy is better so that the government may watch for behaviour it deems "suspicious". When trying to find a needle in a haystack, you better hope the metaphorical needle does something stupid to give themselves away. The fact we don't know if, when and who is a "terrorist"- makes the paranoia and fear all the more pervasive.
As much as we would like to believe we are individuals, our behaviour is dependent on our social context. Studies such as the Milgrum experiment or Stanford University prison experiment amply demonstrate that human beings are far more willing to submit to authority figures than to rebel against them. For the most part, regimes such as Nazi Germany rely on only a handful of people to carry out their atrocities. They are not powerful in terms of numbers, but in initiative, having access to the resources and man power of a state. The reason such governments were allowed to stand up was not necessarily because they were brutal or cruel, but because a majority of the population were wilfully compliant and indifferent to the governments actions. Even the founding fathers recognised that; "mankind is more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right them by abolishing the forms [of government] to which they are accustomed."
We condemn the Nazis and try to draw lessons from history. We argue that gun ownership is necessary to protect us from the threat of a tyrannical government and a necessary precondition to defend individual liberty. We don't want to live in a world where gangs of thugs can set fire to synagogues or break the shop windows of Jewish businesses, where the government can break down the door of people's homes and put people into cattle trains destined for "re-location" somewhere in Poland.
But whilst we may fear the power of the few to commit such violence, history was decided by the silent majority watching-albeit uneasily- their Jewish neighbours being loaded onto the backs of trucks to be taken to ghettos. It was this silent majority that allowed these things to happen, admittedly out of credulity of the lie too big, too preposterous to be questioned that this was necessary for the defence of the people. What would they have made of FDRs speech that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself-nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to turn retreats into advance"?
My point, is that we have to weigh our fear of tyrannical government and our inability to have access to weapons in that eventualityagainst the indifference to gun violence that lives should be sacrificed for Liberty. The sucicidal nature of resistance is unforgiving, but only because of the indifference of a majority that enables those abuses to continue.
In the debate over gun control we have to contend with a nameless, unreasoning terror at the government that necessitates gun rights often without the capacity for suicide that marks resistance against it, the paralysis of gun control advocates who are indifferent to the risks of tranny or the silent, indifference that deaths by gun violence are the price of Liberty?
The question I would ask is Which one most enables the violence of tyranny?