As any student of history knows, gun control figures prominently in the designs of totalitarian states. These features recur: (1) Centralization of the police force with a vast network of surveillance and informants to spy on citizens; (2) National identification cards for all citizens; and (3) Civilian disarmament via gun registration, and licensing, followed by banning and confiscation of firearms. Once this mechanism of oppression is firmly in place, persecution and elimination of political opponents follow, and every social, political, and economic policy the Total State desires can be implemented. This has happened in National Socialist states like Nazi Germany, fascist states like Italy under Mussolini, and communist powers such as the former Soviet Union (and its satellites behind the Iron Curtain) and Red China. It is therefore astonishing and disturbing that Americans have been assailed in the last several years by dangerous political proposals that threaten the individual liberties our Founding Fathers bequeathed to us.
Unbeknownst to many Americans, who have seen and experienced mostly the goodness of America, gun registration is the gateway to civilian disarmament, which often precedes genocide. In the monumental book Lethal Laws* we learn that authoritarian governments that conducted genocide and mass killings of their own populations first disarmed their citizens. The recipe for accomplishing this goal was: demonizing of guns, registration, banning and confiscation, and finally total civilian disarmament. Enslavement of the people then followed with limited resistance, as in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Red China, Cuba, and other totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.
* Jay Simkin, Aaron Zelman, and Alan M. Rice (Milwaukee: Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership, 1994); www.jpfo.org.
When presented with these deadly chronicles and the perilous historic sequence, Americans often opine that it cannot happen here. As to the dangers of licensing of gun owners and registration of firearms, they frequently retort, “If you don’t have anything to hide, then you don’t have anything to fear!” Followed by, “I see nothing wrong with gun registration because we have to do something; there are just too many guns out there that fall into the wrong hands.” These naive attitudes ignore the penchant of governments to accrue power at the expense of the liberties of individuals.
A brief glance at history will tell you that emperors and tyrants have been trying to expand their power and influence over greater and greater areas for centuries. It just happens that today it can be done on a global scale like never before today and a brief glance through this site will prove that tyrants have agents throughout America working to take away our God-given liberty and remove power from the people and place it into the hands of the elite. They are few, but wealthy and powerful, so gun control is a necessity in order to create a new world order.
Civilian disarmament is not only harmful to one’s freedom but also counterproductive in achieving safety. That has been further attested by University of Hawaii Professor R. J. Rummel’s Death by Government (1994) and Stéphane Courtois’s edited volume, The Black Book of Communism (1999). These books make it clear that authoritarianism and totalitarianism are dangerous to the health of humanity. During the twentieth century, more than 100 million people were killed by their own governments bent on destroying liberty and building socialism and collectivism.
When Cubans lost their guns in 1959 they also lost their ability to regain freedom. Thus today, Cubans on the other side of the Florida Strait remain enslaved in what was supposed to have been the dream of a socialist utopia, the ultimate Caribbean Worker’s Paradise. What they ended up with was the nightmare of a police state in a communist island prison.
Americans must vigilantly protect their sacred liberties, which are threatened, for example, by the closing of gun shows with burdensome regulations, rationing lawful gun purchases, and banning the importation of certain firearm accessories. Laws should be directed against criminals and felons, and should be referred to as crime control rather than gun control.
In the wake of New York’s 2013 gun control law, the New York Police Department sent out notices to registered gun owners demanding that they give up their firearms, clear proof that gun registration leads to outright confiscations. The notice provided gun owners, who possessed firearms newly prohibited under New York’s unconstitutional SAFE Act, the “options” to either surrender their firearms to the police, remove them from the city limits or otherwise render them inoperable. The NYPD knew exactly who to send the notices to by using a centralized firearms registry which lists the city’s gun owners and what firearms they have in their possession.
Registration and the Law
Another fact Americans need to understand is that registration is directed at law-abiding citizens, not criminals. Not only do convicted criminals by definition fail to obey the law, but they are also constitutionally protected against any registration requirement. In Haynes v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968 ruled that requiring registration by those who unlawfully possess firearms amounts to a violation of the Fifth Amendment’s proscription against forced self-incrimination. The court said that if someone “realistically can expect that registration will substantially increase the likelihood of his prosecution,” the registration requirement is unconstitutional.
In short, with the historically crucial and potentially fatal issue of progressive civilian disarmament, perhaps, we should once again summon the words of the “Federal Farmer” (1788): “To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.”
Sources:
- https://fee.org/articles/national-gun-registration-the-road-to-tyranny/
