Facebook Follies of Friends and Families

[The Brain]

The Nazi posts from the nut brigade are about dogwhistling that they like Nazis. There is no deeper meaning to them.

[Razgovory]

Most of the victims of the holocaust were not German Jews.  Most were Polish or Soviet.  They were protected by guns.  The Germans simply rolled over the guys with the guns and killed the Jews anyway.

We have plenty of evidence that citizens of the US would not be able to resist any more than the Jews of Germany because we set our own concentration camps.  Pretty much every person of Japanese decent in the Continental United States was thrown into a concentration camp.  These people had access to guns, there was no law saying that people of Japanese decent couldn't own guns and the people who were thrown into the concentration camps had no idea what would happen to them.  And yet, they walked into the camps all the same.  I told this to one of those gun rights guys and he was pretty much flabbergasted.

There is one other factor that ties into the concentration camps stuff: The gun-rights guys are most likely the people who a persecuted minority would be struggling against. If the government began going after Muslims, or immigrants, or blacks would the guns-rights people be the ones standing up and saying that these people need to protect themselves from a tyrannical government?  I seriously doubt it.

[DGuller]

The only way having a gun will help you protect your family against a totalitarian regime is if you use it to shoot yourself.  Maybe they'll forget about your family when they need to fill the quota, if you didn't stick around to be convicted.  Maybe...

[Admiral Yi]

The only way having a gun will help you protect your family against a totalitarian regime is if you use it to shoot yourself.  Maybe they'll forget about your family when they need to fill the quota, if you didn't stick around to be convicted.  Maybe...

This is ridiculous.  Hundreds of wars of independence have been fought with guns.  Regimes have been overthrown with guns.

[DGuller]

The only way having a gun will help you protect your family against a totalitarian regime is if you use it to shoot yourself.  Maybe they'll forget about your family when they need to fill the quota, if you didn't stick around to be convicted.  Maybe...

This is ridiculous.  Hundreds of wars of independence have been fought with guns.  Regimes have been overthrown with guns.

Hundreds of wars of independence have been fought with people wearing pants.  That doesn't mean that pants are the difference between a regime surviving and crumbling.

As Malthus explained, in order to successfully overthrow a government, you need a lot of things to come together.  If you have those other things, guns will find their way to the combatants.  Plenty of successful overthrows happened in places where almost no one started out being armed.  If you don't have those other things, guns aren't going to make an iota of difference.

[Admiral Yi]

Hundreds of wars of independence have been fought with people wearing pants.  That doesn't mean that pants are the difference between a regime surviving and crumbling.

This is not the statement I disagreed with.

[DGuller]

Hundreds of wars of independence have been fought with people wearing pants.  That doesn't mean that pants are the difference between a regime surviving and crumbling.

This is not the statement I disagreed with.

I know that.  That statement didn't even exist until after I replied to you.

[Admiral Yi]

I'm out.

[DGuller]

Before you leave, would you mind elaborating what it is that you disagreed with?  Maybe a couple of short sentence don't always do justice to the point you're trying to make.

[Admiral Yi]

The only way having a gun will help you protect your family against a totalitarian regime is if you use it to shoot yourself.

[DGuller]

Well, obviously, if you're already in an open rebellion against a totalitarian regime, you're better off holding a gun rather than a dick in your hand.  I thought it was clear from the context that I wasn't making a point that a gun was useless to a Banderovite in 1946.  I was making a point that a gun was useless to a military officer in 1937.  There was only one way that his gun would get him out of an execution.

[Eddie Teach]

Shoot the guards at the border crossing.

[Malthus]

The notion in contention is that if the Germans had gun laws like those of modern America, the Jews could have armed themselves, and so have avoided being rounded up by the Nazis.

Never mind that most of the Jews who died were Eastern European, and think only of the German Jews.

The answer to that notion is that even if the German Jews were able to buy guns at the store, that would not have helped them much, because merely owning guns is no protection against the apparatus of a malevolent modern state. Other groups of Germans who were in fact armed with guns fell victim to the Nazis nonetheless and their guns did not help them - namely, the suspects from the armed forces rounded up and murdered after the failed bombing attempt on Hitler.

[Josquius]

There are plenty of valid reasons for people to have guns.
Protection (from humans) is not one of them. This is a laughably idiotic argument. Especially when taken to the protection from the government lengths of the crazies.

[Malthus]

There are plenty of valid reasons for people to have guns.
Protection (from humans) is not one of them. This is a laughably idiotic argument. Especially when taken to the protection from the government lengths of the crazies.

I think the problem is that, in the US, the reasoning behind having an absolute right to guns is an section of their constitution concerning raising a militia — and their founding mythology has a lot to say about the value of resistance to the British by the average yeoman-farmer types.

In this way, the right to own guns has an expressly militant justification - it is required to repel tyranny, presumably by use of a citizen's militia. Thus, it is necessary to believe that owning guns can not only be valuable in repelling tyranny, but an absolute necessity. If this is not true, the basis of the right is undermined - that part of the constitution could appear as nothing more than an archaic survival from the 18th century, no doubt useful at the time but not so much now. 

So it is necessary to believe things like 'if only the Jews had access to guns, they would have been okay'. Usually by way of saying 'remove or impede our access to guns, and we could end up just like them'.