English: DONSKOI MONASTERY, MOSCOW. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s funeral. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
On another forum, there’s a guy who says he’s a veteran, who is arguing in favor of gun control. (I take such claims at face value absent contrary evidence). This page is for putting up my answers to his comments:
“My personal experience in war situations is that casual arming or civilians can only make the situation worse. They prove no match for trained soldier and it only leads to more humanitarian consequences. That was surely the case in Bosnia, a situation I am familiar with.”
That decision should be left to the Bosnians. Heavy-handed unarmed peacekeeping by the UN and heavily armed (tanks, missiles, you name it) intervention by the US, none of it has succeeded anywhere, at least in recent decades. Honoring the Bosnian demands to be allowed to defend themselves (did the UN/NATO alliance also deny them training in their use?), could it have turned out any worse than the mass “ethnic cleansing” that supposedly happened?
At least the Biafrans were able to punish the other Nigerian tribes severely for their efforts. Hitler’s Brownshirts and Stormtroopers had little to fear from return fire.
“More important is prompt international peace keeping intervention, which the Americans are often not good at. Outside the US you will get few supporters for you approach to this problem.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is one very important voice from “outside the US” who is a strong advocate of this approach. WW2 Holocaust survivors have also lamented their lack of having any way to defend themselves. Armenian survivors of the genocide of circa 1905 point out they gave up their arms only to wish they had not.
One of the reasons that guns are such a strong tradition in the United States was the reaction to the Great British Gun Grab that had its climax in “The Shot Heard Around the World” at Lexington, where the Brits had come on orders of the government to confiscate the colonists’ weapons.
Control by occupying governments afraid of their victims is nothing new. When the Philistines oppressed the Hebrews, during the time they had no standing army at all (or government), they banned swords and swordsmiths altogether for their subjects. Time after time, a “judge” would come along that would organize an army and they would start making weapons to throw off the oppressing government. Civilian farmers all. In Gideon’s case led by a farmer, and in the case of Deborah, led by a woman of faith.
“At this time the UN and others are looking at way of reducing the presence of arms, especially in Africa, as a way of reducing violence.”
The worst thing that can happen to world, since the UN is only going to favor existing governments, which around the world are more oppressive every day. So dictators around the world of course are going along with this. We should feel safer for this? The only nations against it are the ones that the UN has already declared rogue.
Not that they are any fair judge of anything. In 2009 the entire UN unanimously voted to condemn Honduras for its constitutional and legal removal of a rogue president who became a dictator in office, and threatened to make himself president-for-life under cover of fraud. None of that mattered to the rogue dictator-friendly United Nations.
God save us from the United Nations, they are one of the biggest supervisors of violence on the planet. Their intervention and ban on arms shipments to Bosnia while arms poured in to the Serbs from the Russians only prolongued the war.
And now we have the United Nations declaring that Syria should give up the nation to al Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood (mother of Hamas) and their allies? You know the guys who are yelling “Die Christian dog!” as they kill members of one of the oldest Christian communities in the world? The ones who were documented by a European journalist as using chemical weapons themselves?
Senator McCain and the United Nations are sounding the same war drums here. Look again. What is wrong with that picture.
“I am afraid the American happiness is a warm gun attitude will win few friends in Europe or Australasia. To suggest the ownership would have countered the growth of fascism is frankly absurd.”
Fair-weather friends who have disarmed their own people are no friends to anybody. Crime is up in England and Australia, who are bragging about their carefully filtered statistics while hiding the relevant ones under a desk somewhere.
Honduras recently has been one of the most violent countries in the world, having a big gang problem that started mostly as a deported export of Los Angeles Salvadoran and Honduran gangs. My wife is from Honduras. These gangs don’t need no stinkin’ permits, they make bazooka-style weapons from common materials found in the home. They steal weapons to get them.
When there is a ban on anything, there will be somebody eager to profit off the extra illegality markups.
Heck, the proof that governments are the most dangerous are right here in our own borders. Our own government ran protection for at least one large shipment of thousands of big bad guns sold to the most violent gang in the Americas across the border!
And that same government has punished the whistleblowers and promoted the criminals who did it! Meaning, somebody higher up than the guys that ran the regional office wanted it to happen.
And I’m supposed to feel safe with my neighbors giving up their right to self-defense, so we can expect protection from that same government?
No sir, bad guys having guns is bad. Banning good guys from having them is much worse.
As a footnote, anecdotes sometimes illustrate the principle. My wife saved her own son from a kidnapping by using her own concealed self-protection that she pulled out of her purse to stop it. God help anybody who tells her she should have had that equalizer with her. She is of short stature but what she had made it a more level playing field.
She was also a passenger once on a tour bus that was stopped on the road in Nicaragua where a gang intended to rob everything from everyone. One guy pulled out his self-protection and began making noise with it. The robbers had guys in the bushes. Everybody else started pulling out their own and shooting back. The bus driver just flew on ahead down the road.
Nothing panics a robber like somebody who is able to defend himself against them.
It’s outrageous and insulting to tell people that they have no right to defend themselves equally with an attacker.
But let’s understand the most important principle. Guns have provided a means of self-defense to many people in history, also. The independent militias were important to the American side in the Revolutionary War. The civilian paramilitary volunteers in the Vietnam border with China defended that nation against the bigger colossus to the north and drove them back. An ad-hoc civilian militia composed of WW2 veterans and other civilians together enforced the law and an honest election against a local cartel in a Tennessee county that ran the county like a plantation.
People with government power have no right to enforce anything that they don’t have. So far as I know, it’s been governments that have used weapons of mass destruction, nuclear bombs, chemical weapons, and possibly even now biological weapons. They’re working hard on the last one. At least let the good guys across the land that want to, let them be prepared. You never know if the next Fast and Furious scandal will involve smuggling weapons to the worst gangs on this side of the border. Or the next gun control law might be rigged to stop blacks from owning them, like the first gun control laws passed in the States in the past.
With the recent scandals and illegal and unconstitutional seizure of information from AP, even the Obama sycophants at MSNBC are worried. The AP is almost a declared organ of UN and pro-government-control propaganda, and Obama praise.
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