In Trump Derangement Syndrome, still sweeping the nation, anyone less than worshipful of Hillary Clinton is a racist, sexist, homophobe, Islamophobe, right-wing, white nationalist, white supremacist, and of course a Nazi, which usually comes first. This invites a look at the kind of gun control Democrats seek to impose.
Democrats and their media allies seem to assume that National Socialist Germany was fully laissez-faire on firearms. Germans lined up at Klaus’s Guns and Ammo Supply, with weekly specials on the Sturmgewehr, the first assault rifle, with a 30-round magazine. Buy now and Klaus will throw in two extra magazines, a Luger pistol, two cases of bullets, and free access to shooting ranges and gun shows all over greater Deutschland.
That’s the sort of picture that emerges from Democrats, who have little clue about actual conditions in National Socialist Germany. For that see Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State,” by Stephen P. Halbrook.
Before the Nazis took power, Halbrook notes, the liberal Weimar Republic sought to register, regulate and prohibit firearms. A 1926 order demanded surrender of all firearms and a 1926 Bavarian law barred Gypsies from owning guns.
A Weimar center-right government required a license to manufacture, assemble or repair firearms and ammunition and even to reload cartridges. Trade in arms was prohibited at fairs and shooting competitions. Germans citizens had no legal right to bear arms or keep guns in the home.
As Halbrook notes, the Weimar prohibitions, enforced by the police, only “restricted average citizens who voluntarily submitted to the state’s rule, so that little room existed for the development of a single body of armed citizens who supported democracy to play a dissuasive role against tyranny or extremism.”
When the National Socialist German Workers Party took power in 1933, they grabbed the registration records of the Weimar Republic. Nazi official Wilhelm Elfes ruled that weapons belonged only in the hands of the Reich and the states. In the Nazi view, nobody needed a firearm for self-defense when the police protected society and sport shooting and hunting were not a “need,” as determined by the government.
Halbrook shows how the National Socialists advanced Gleichshaltung, forcing all institutions into a totalitarian system. They used the Weimar regulations to deny access to firearms to anyone not an adherent of Nazism. The purge included the Stahlhelm, a veterans group critical of the Nazi regime, and all “unreliable” types. German Jews were a particular target even before the infamous Nuremberg Laws took effect.
In 1896, Albert Flatow won first place in gymnastic events at the Olympic games. In 1932, Flatow registered three handguns as required by a decree of the liberal Weimar Republic. On October 4, 1938, the Nazis arrested the Olympic champion for possession of the firearms he dutifully registered in 1932. His arrest report stated that “arms in the hands of Jews are a danger to public safety.”
Flatow was turned over to the Gestapo and died of starvation in Theresienstadt Concentration Camp in December 1942. For Halbrook, the lesson is obvious.
“A disarmed populace that is taught that it has no rights other than what the government decrees as positive law is obviously more susceptible to totalitarian rule and is less able to resist oppression.” On the other hand, “an armed populace with a political culture of allowed constitutional and natural rights that they are motivated to fight for is less likely to fall under the sway of a tyranny.”
That has been the American experience under the Second Amendment but Democrats find an armed populace a threat to their predestined social-justice utopia. In effect, those who see any merit in the America that currently exists, and those who voted for Donald Trump, are enemies of that utopia. So Democrats seek to disarm such “enemies,” sometimes under the guise of health and safety concerns.
For example, California governor Jerry Brown’s recent budget gives $5 million to the University of California Firearm Violence Research Center. The first project of this center will be “a survey that looks at who owns guns, why they own them and how they use firearms.” Like the Nazis, they want “the names,” but there’s more to it.
Thanks to governor Jerry Brown, who recently signed the bill making California a sanctuary state, Californians now face ID and background checks to purchase ammunition, and the state will create a new database of ammunition owners. Magazines holding more than 10 rounds are banned and the state now restricts the loaning of guns, even to close family members.
California senator Dianne Feinstein spearheads the federal Democrats’ gun-control surge.
Tuesday, the 84-year-old made it official that she is running for a fifth term. “Lots more to do,” she announced, “ending gun violence, combating climate change, access to healthcare. I’m all in!”
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