Bart Stinson
Contrary to popular misconception, the Nazis did not invent gun control in Germany. They inherited the Law on Firearms & Ammunition from the freely elected, well-meaning regime that preceded them. The 1928 law required registration of guns and gun owners, in response to the epidemic of violent political clashes that had frightened decent Germans on their own streets. Something had to be done.
But when the Nazis came to power in 1933, they didn’t just inherit the law. They inherited the lists. They now knew exactly who owned what, and where they were located. At first there were no midnight visits from the Gestapo. But anti-Nazi Germans found that government clerks quietly declined to renew their annual permits. In some cases, they were revoked early.
Then, in 1938, the Nazis expanded on the previous gun controls. They legislated handgun restrictions. Only politically reliable Germans, mainly Nazi party members, were allowed to possess handguns. The registration lists provided a map for raids on citizens who failed to voluntarily surrender their weapons. After that, Nazi thugs and Gestapo could kick down doors and manhandle German men, women and children with impunity.
Some otherwise intelligent Americans have scoffed at the idea that the Second Amendment protects us from tyranny. Surely, they say, the government’s tanks, artillery and helicopter gunships would make short work of any resistance by carbines and handguns.
That’s probably true. But carbines and handguns precede heavy artillery. The putsches that seize political control over big government firepower, the ability to deploy tanks, artillery and helicopter gunships in the first place, are accomplished by intimidating or raiding political opponents who might object and resist.
That first thuggish step is labor-intensive. Real flesh-and-blood hoodlums have to confront real opponents. Does it matter whether we have carbines and handguns? It matters to the hoodlums.
That’s how the Second Amendment deters tyranny – not by overcoming B-2 bombers and Apache helicopters, but by keeping our political transfers of power free of asymmetrical violence. They’re not going to be able to carpet-bomb our neighborhoods with government aircraft unless we first lay down our carbines and handguns in gentle obedience to nice men and women from the government who are here to help us.
Kristallnacht was inevitable after implementation of the Nazi gun controls in 1938. But for good measure, the Nazis announced new regulations on the day after their rampage against synagogues and Jewish businesses in Germany and newly annexed Austria. I don’t call them gun regulations, because they prohibited Jews to possess weapons of any kind, including clubs or knives.
I can only speculate that the new regulations were occasioned by Nazi hoodlums getting some unexpected resistance during Kristallnacht from Jews with sharp objects. How different would history have been if those Jews had a credible capacity to resist and deter Nazi thuggery? There probably would have been a fairly high level of street violence, some heartbreaking innocent casualties, and chronic tension between Jews and gentiles.
Nobody would have been grateful that a great genocide was averted, because we would have never heard of the Holocaust. Some would still call for disarming the Jews every time a rival or innocent victim fell to Jewish gunfire. There were Jewish criminals and lunatics, after all, not just Nobel laureates and symphony composers.
What if all Germans – Jew and gentile alike – had stood their ground against gun registration in 1928? The Nazis might still have come to power in 1933, but they would have faced robust opposition when they took a radical turn toward totalitarianism in 1938. They would not have been able to intimidate and silence adult supervision from decent, sensible Germans. The German opposition would have been able to call the Nazis’ bluff, and perhaps nip the Holocaust and a catastrophic European war in the bud.
In 1968, Americans, grieving over the shooting deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King that Spring, marched to the brink of gun registration. Sen. Thomas Dodd proposed a gun control bill that closely resembled the Nazi gun laws. We know that he was aware of the German law, because the Library of Congress documented its translation of Dodd’s personal copy four months before he chaired the bill’s Senate hearings.
That copy was perhaps a souvenir of Dodd’s 15 months in Nuremberg 20 years earlier, prosecuting Nazi war crimes. Rep. John Dingell eventually persuaded Congress to remove the gun registration provisions from the bill. He angered fellow Democrats by pointing out the German experience with gun registration, but he prevailed.
I hope my grandchildren never have to look back on my generation as the one that relinquished our Constitutional right and capacity to resist violent and genocidal tyranny.
Some people can learn from history like Rep. Dingell. Some can’t. Unfortunately, the ones who don’t learn from history can drag the rest of us into preventable tragedies along with them. Gun registration is a really bad idea.
