Conservative commentator Bill Whittle wants you to know what We the Teapole believe that gun ownership is critical to our survival as a free people. Damn Martin Albright’s eyes! The war vet and TTAG commentator has convinced me that personal firearms ownership is not the bulwark against fascism, despotism, etc. that its advocates (which include me) believe. If Jews had owned firearms, they would have been slaughtered like the armed Russians who opposed Hitler’s troops. Still, the Constitution is the foundation of the American experiment. And the Second Amendment is my friend. And the friends of my friend are my friend.
I see his point, but I not a gun owner or gun enthusiast because of fear. I am one of those romantic saps who feels that Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness are essential to being American and will stand up for them everytime, all the time.
Stay free or die trying?
"If Jews had owned firearms, they would have been slaughtered like the armed Russians who opposed Hitler’s troops."
Neither the jews or russian's owned the amount of firepower that the free citizens of America posses. I have more than one combat vet relative/friend who would vehemently disagree with your fiends opinion.
The problem with Martin's argument it that it presupposes that this is a two-sided argument, to wit: if having guns would get you killed, then NOT having guns will keep you safe. Au contrair. Sure, jack-booted storm troopers can always overpower the citizenry with superior firepower. (Or underpaid, corrupt cops: See "New Orleans/Katrina, Aftermath") but the value of private gun ownership in such situations is that it makes for a less compliant public, and more importantly, a whole buncha sound bites for the evening news that get everybody up in arms (pardon the pun).
If we'd had no private gun ownership in New Orleans, not only would looting have been worse, but the wretched excesses of the police and mayor's office would have gone unnoticed, as the trampling on the Constitution would have never made it to the 6 o'clock news.
Private gun ownership, I maintain, has the same kind of deterrent value to the government that a lasergip has to a perp. It may not make you any safer or seriously enhance your ability to stop an aggressor, but the PERCEIVED value is enormous, especially in the minds of the aggressors.
To clarify a bit, my argument is not that an armed citizenry is powerless against an oppressive government. It's worth noting, regarding the Katrina incident, that it was the public reporting of the police disarming citizens (and the firestorm of criticism that followed) that finally shamed the local governments into stopping the practice. In a pure dictatorship with no free press, no freedom of speech and no need for the government to curry favor with the populace, such disclosures are impossible and also irrelevant.
My point was simply that it's not a simple equation of guns in civilian hands = freedom. There are plenty of free countries where citizens either can't own guns or can only do so with the permission of the state (think of Canada, Japan or most of Western Europe.) We might not agree with their definition of "freedom" but it's not for us to define.
Or to simplify a bit: You can have guns in private hands and still not have "freedom" (think Somalia, Beirut, Afghanistan, or any other country swimming in guns and wracked by conflict) and you can have freedom without having privately owned guns (again, Japan, other parts of Asia and much of Europe where guns are either outlawed or effectively restricted to those that have the blessing of the state.) Having a functioning set of institutions and a general respect for the law is a much more important guarantor of freedom than gun ownership.
"If Jews had owned firearms, they would have been slaughtered like the armed Russians who opposed Hitler’s troops."
The armed Russians blew a lot a those Nazi bastards straight to hell. Lightly armed Jews did the same in Warsaw using obsolete and improvised weapons. If politicians are afraid because the citizenry is armed, I think that's absolutely great. They certainly aren't afraid of our ballots. Let them fear our bullets.
Why is America being compare to a country thousand of miles away and to a period that was a long time ago? Germany and Russia have until recently been under a dictictorship of one form or another. Compare them to us is like compare apple and orange.
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