Mass Shootings In Gun-Free Nations
BY Herschel Smith
7 years ago
The global history of mass shootings demonstrates that the vast majority of these crimes are perpetrated in places where citizen firearms ownership is close to nil. While people can argue about cause and effect, the facts are indisputable.
This might seem surprising to people who read a recent article in the New York Times claiming that the mass shootings in the United States are a direct consequence of the high density of gun ownership in the country. But the article is analytically flawed, as Robert VerBruggen detailed for National Review Online. For example, the Times article is based on a study by a professor who refuses to allow skeptics to see his data or his methodology. But let’s hypothesize that the assertions by the professor are correct. It is still true that mass shooting fatalities are heavily concentrated in areas where citizen firearms possession is prohibited.
Consider, for example, some of the deadliest mass shootings of the 20th century. As soon as the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941, special SS units called Einsatzgruppen were deployed for mass killings. All the Jews or Gypsies (also known as Roma) in a village would be assembled and marched out of town. Then they would all be shot at once. (Yehuda Bauer, “Jewish Resistance in the Ukraine and Belarus during the Holocaust,” in Jewish Resistance Against the Nazis, Patrick Henry ed. [D. C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2014], pp. 485-93.)
Within a year, the 3,000 Einsatzgruppen, aided by several thousand helpers from the German police and military, had murdered about 1 million people, concentrating on small towns in formerly Soviet territory. (Hillary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958 [Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2009], pp. 4–8; Reuben Ainsztein, Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe [London: Elek Books, 1974], pp. 222–25.) Einsatzgruppen mass shootings took place not only in today’s Russia but also in nations that the Soviet Communists had taken over, and which were then over-run by the Nazis: eastern Poland (taken by Stalin pursuant to the 1939 Nazi-Soviet Pact), Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.
Because of psychological damage to the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazis attempted to replace mass shootings with mobile gas vans. But these did not work out well, partly because herding people into the gas vans required even closer contact with the victims than did mass shooting. (Earl, p. 7). Therefore, the Nazis invented extermination camps with huge gas chambers, which were more efficient at mass killing, and which created a larger physical (and, consequently, psychological) distance between the murderers and their victims.
In pre-WWII Poland and in the Soviet Union, “no firearm, not even a shotgun,” could be lawfully possessed without a government permit. For most people, “such permits were impossible to obtain.” (Ainsztein, p. 304; see also Chaika Grossman, The Underground Army: Fighters of Bialystok Ghetto, trans. Schmuel Beeri [N.Y.: Holocaust Library, 1987; first pub. in Israel 1965], p. 3.) “Not to allow the peasants to have arms” had been the policy “from time immemorial.” (Ainsztein, p. 304.) In this regard, Lenin and Stalin carried on the Russian czarist tradition, as they did in many other ways. (See generally Eugene Lyons, Stalin: Czar of All the Russias [Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1940]; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar [N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004].)
In Poland, the main way that firearms got into citizens’ hands was peasant scavenging of rifles that had been left behind from the battles of World War I (1914-1918) and the Russo-Polish War (1919-1920). Usually the rifle barrels would be sawed short, for concealment. (Ainsztein, p. 304.) But thanks to the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Soviet Union invaded and conquered the eastern third of Poland at the beginning of World War II. The Soviet secret police, the NKVD, “took great care to disarm the local population, and was very successful.” (Ibid.)
The one big chance to acquire arms was in the chaos immediately after June 22, 1941. In those first weeks, the Soviet army reeled in retreat, leaving large quantities of weapons behind. But the abandoned arms tended to be in rural areas (where Polish peasants picked up many), whereas most Jews lived in cities or towns. (Ibid.)
During the chaotic early weeks on the Eastern Front, the Nazis successfully deterred most Jews from attempting to scavenge arms. As in every nation conquered by the Third Reich, being caught with a firearm meant instant death for oneself and one’s family, and perhaps even for others, in reprisal. This was especially so for Jews. Disarmed, the Jews and Roma were soon destroyed.
Victims of a mass shooting perpetrated by organized government are just as dead as victims of a mass shooting perpetrated by a lone nut. Adopt the broadest definition of “mass shooting” that you want (e.g., three victims wounded, one killed). Add up all the mass shooting deaths from lunatics, organized crime, jihadist cells and ordinary criminals. The global, historical total of mass shooting deaths will be gruesome, and it will also be small compared to the total of mass shooting deaths perpetrated by criminal governments — including Fascists, Communists and non-ideological tyrants.
University of Hawaii political science professor R.J. Rummel compiled demographic data regarding genocide. He estimated the total number of victims of mass murders by governments from 1901 to 1990 to be 169,198,000. (Rudolph J. Rummel, Death by Government [Piscataway, N.J.: Transaction Pub., 2d ed. 2000].) This figure does not include deaths from wars; it includes only deliberate mass murder of civilian populations.
Let that number wash over you again, and consider it in the context of Hitler, Pol Pot, the Armenian Christian genocide at the hands of the Turkish Muslims, and the Christians in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Uganda (under Idi Amin), and throughout Africa (the later count of murdered Christians may not even be included in the estimate).
This is why we have a second amendment. Right there before your eyes. Look no further. We have weapons because of the evil perpetrated on men by governments. If you ever forego having them and training with them, you risk a similar fate.
Ask yourself why these numbers are excluded in the statistics on mass shootings by the controllers?
On November 15, 2017 at 10:59 am, Houston said:
But Herschel don’t you know that can’t happen here? That is what we are told anyway. But in the next breath when discussing confiscation we are told we can’t resist the military and law enforcement with our puny rifles and handguns anyway.
The ignorance of history these idiots is astounding.
On November 26, 2019 at 1:59 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
Kenneth Royce, better known to most readers as “Boston” of “Boston’s Gun Bible” fame, has stated that “gun control laws” ought to be called, in the interests of honesty, “victim disarmament laws” instead, for that is what such laws do – disarm those whom tyrants would tyrannize, abuse, and ultimately exterminate.
It isn’t simply the gun-banning intent of those who would disarm us, it is the more-and-more genocidal intent that they display. Leftists (communists) calling for traditional Americans and Christians to be harassed, brutalized, impoverished, and ground underfoot. A few even call for us to be killed, exterminated, eliminated, whatever your preferred term of violence happens to be.
Rummel, et al. identified a multistage process genocides and mass murders go through; first, a target population is identified and singled out for abuse. They are blamed for all of that society’s ills, real or imagined. This is scapegoating, a critical step in the dehumanization process.
After scapegoating, comes pseudospeciation and dehumanization. Contrary to popular belief, most typical humans are not, per se, cold-blooded killers. They have to be conditioned to the ideal, desensitized to the idea of having blood on their hands. This is done by dehumanizing the targeted population, thereby tacitly giving permission for “normal” humans to prey upon those so identified.
Next, come active measures against the intended victims. First, the violence inflicted is primarily cultural and economic; in Nazi Germany, the shops and businesses of Jews being vandalized and defaced with graffiti. Emboldened, the perpetrators soon graduate to more-stringent measures – arson, rape, assault and murder. Finally, mass imprisonments in concentration camps and the inevitable executions. Or death by whatever means the regime desires.
Objectively-speaking, traditional Americans are roughly one-third to half-the-way through the genocidal time line and progression. Colloquially-speaking, they are being measured for the drop. Modify your behavior accordingly….