Why We Carry Guns

 The repeal of the Jim Crow era law requiring citizens to obtain a permit to purchase a handgun was a big deal.  But Andrea Widburg's post at the American Thinker entitled The most dangerous guns are those in governmen's hands points to another big deal, to wit: that the governments' monopoly of force is a clear and present danger to its own citizens.

Tucker Carlson made a great point last night: There are about 70 million more guns in America than there are citizens, and gun owners have billions of rounds. If guns were inherently dangerous, America would be in a perpetual state of Armageddon-like warfare, but it’s not. That’s because most Americans are good people. But there is a group of people that should never be allowed sole possession of guns because when they go bad, they go very, very bad, and that’s government employees—and I’ve got the numbers to prove it.

With help from Rummel’s data and from other readily available (and uncontested) information on the internet, I was able to compile a short list showing what happens when just a few governments turn on their citizens—and all the numbers far exceed anything American citizens do to each other.

Turkey: In 1915, the Turkish government murdered an estimated 1.5 million Armenians.

Soviet Union: In the 1920s through mid-1930s, Stalin went to war against the Kulaks, Ukraine’s independent farmers (the Holodomor). The government starved, executed, and deported the Kulaks, killing an estimated 7 million in less than a decade.

While that was a targeted mass murder, the Soviet Union generally attacked its own citizens, starving them, executing them, or sending them to gulags. Estimates range from 7 million to 20 million people dying from the Soviet government’s policies and purges.

China in the 1960s through 1970s: Mao made Stalin look like an amateur. We don’t know how many people died from executions, starvation, and slave labor during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, but estimates range from 23 million to 46 million Chinese. Outlying estimates are that 50 million or more Chinese died for Mao’s statist vision.

Nazi Germany, from 1933-1945: Any disfavored civilians not already unarmed before the Nazis gained power were disarmed when the Nazis achieved power. The Nazis then executed 6 million Jews; 250,000 gypsies; 220,000 homosexuals, and, through slave labor, executions, and starvation, as many as 10 million Slavic people. The number of handicapped people killed is unknown. Another 19,000,000 European civilians were estimated to have died because they found themselves in the path of Hitler’s war.

Cambodia: Between 1975 and 1979, under Pol Pot, the government killed between 1.7 and 2.2 million of its own citizens, out of a population of around 8 million people. That’s a lot more than 10.2 murders per 100,000.

...snip...

We’ve already seen the current government and its media allies menacing those American citizens it views as a threat to its power (e.g., January 6, which increasingly looks like a Reichstag Fire event; the unending, unconstitutional pretrial internment of the J6 prisoners; Democrat leaders who encourage violence; the purging of the historic record about attacks on Republican politicians; the weaponization of the IRS; etc.). I don’t like to think what it could do if it felt there were no barriers to action.

One commenter feels that the United States hasn't had any cases of demicide. Apparently he hasn't connected the dots from mere harrassment to actual killings on an industrial scale. Like all criminals, they don't start out killing people. They start out small, and their crimes continue to get worse and worse unless stopped. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to stop these criminals before they can get worse. Most of these things mentioned are crimes being committed uncer color of law and should be punished. It remains to be seen whether our Republican representatives will punish them for any of this.

I would also point out that adding yet more gun laws to the books while failing to prosecute the ones we already have is pure lunacy. Indeed, if crimes are not to be prosecuted, then they shouldn't be on the books at all. But if we are on our own to defend ourselves, we must have the means to do so.  It is not the social contract we grew up with, but it seems it is the social contract into which we are being forced.