Abusing History in Support of Gun Rights
May 11, 2009
Whatever merits there might or might not be to the case gun rights advocates make in favor of more guns and less government restriction, a recent email equating gun control with totalitarianism is over the top. The offending message and FactCheck.org’s corrections are worth reading.
Stoneman’s Corner
- Book Review: GDR and Consumption January 13, 2013
- Teaching Notes: Synthesis and Process September 29, 2012
- Hist 499-005: Gender and Class in Modern Europe August 18, 2012
- Reflections after Class July 3, 2012
- Requiring Students to Use Chicago Style (or Turabian or Whatever) June 14, 2012
- Military History Conference May 13, 2012
- Syllabus for Hist 606: Themes in European History II May 3, 2012
- Command Culture by Jörg Muth April 28, 2012
- Who Should Groener’s Schlieffen Plan Matter To? March 18, 2012
- Hist 499-003: Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Required Books) March 7, 2012
Actually the whole thing is bizarre.
Assuming that the dissidents in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany did have firearms, and used them to resist arrest, how long would they have been able to do so?
People who resist arrest using firearms usually die sooner, or have to surrender sooner or later.
The best chance of avoiding arrest in a totalitarian state is to avoid and evade the police, not confront them, and if possible skip across the border into a free(er) country, assuming that there is one nearby.
Thank you for posting this, Mark. Another area of cultural or intellectual blindness that often coincides with these discussions is the false belief that violent actions are the ONLY way to defend oneself, or attain liberty.
In fact, there are many well-documented accounts of successful, non-violent resistance to oppression. There was much non-violent resistance to the Nazis in WWII. Then we have the shining examples of Gandhi (whose spearheaded a movement leading to India’s independence), Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement; and the work of Cesar Chavez. More recently, former Soviet Republics such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Lithuania, led the way to independence – and the dismantling of the former Soviet Union – largely through non-violent means.
Why aren’t these non-violent examples taught with the same rigor as the endless litany of war that comprises so much history “education”? (that’s what I remember from my school days – history as a catalogue of war!) To my mind, it stems from ignorance, failure of the imagination, or just plain refusal to see….