How Gun Control Led to Tyrnanny in Venezuela

Tom Knighton has an important post at his blog Bearing Arms entitle Op-ed Examines How Gun Control In Venezuela Led to Tyranny. Knighton's posts at Bearing Arms tend to be short, with few links outside the post itself. This is because Knighton wants to highlight one aspect of the gun rights argument or another. This, however, is wide ranging, as the Left has consistently denied the connection between citizen disarmament and tyranny.  At its base, this is one reason for the Second Amendment.  The founders did not want to give the fledgling government a monopoly of violence in the United States.

Many people have noted that the Nazis took advantage of the registration of guns (and their owners) under the Weimar Republic to confiscate first the weapons owned by Jews. But as they became more tyrannical, more and more people's guns were confiscated. Many gun control advocates point out that the Nazis didn't pass this gun registration.  They are right as far as the go.  The Nazis did not initially pass gun confiscation, but they did indeed take advantage for nefarious purposes the gun control laws naively put in place by the previous government for supposedly innocent purposes.

The wide eyed naivete of the average Venezuelan before the disarmament law came into effect can be seen in this quote from the Fox News link in the article:

“Venezuelans didn’t care enough about it. The idea of having the means to protect your home was seen as only needed out in the fields. People never would have believed they needed to defend themselves against the government,” Vanegas explained. “Venezuelans evolved to always hope that our government would be non-tyrannical, non-violator of human rights, and would always have a good enough control of criminality.”

He said it didn’t take long for such a wide-eyed public perception to fall apart. “If guns had been a stronger part of our culture, if there had been a sense of duty for one to protect their individual rights, and as a show of force against a government power – and had legal carry been a common thing – it would have made a huge difference,” he lamented.

This shows the need to stay vigilant, to even be unreasonable when it comes to maintaining our right to weapons for self defense. Please go and read the linked article, but more importantly, go read the linked articles, particularly the Fox News article, which contains a number of primary sources.