“[I]t’s racist and it’s bigoted to say that guns are quintessentially American”

Piers highlighted the reason why he had Alex Jones on his show. He pushed Alex’s buttons to make him rant and rave (which I suppose isn’t hard) and he tied his position on guns to his position on 911 conspiracy. Most reasonable people think 911 conspiracies are for lunatics and most reasonable people like raving lunatics even less. In this clip Piers and Alan try to make the case that not wanting the so-called assault weapons confiscated equals being a 911 conspiracy nut.

There isn’t much point about repeating the arguments made by both sides over and over, but I have some comments from a European perspective:

1. Piers’ insistence on comparing gun violence to gun violence is nonsense as the relevant statistic is murder rate. I couldn’t care less if I were murdered by a machete (as millions were in Rwanda) or by an automatic weapon (as are tens of thousands in say Mexico). I care about not being murdered.

2. Breivik, the worst of these lone mass-murderers in Europe, used handguns and a self-made bomb. His extremely high body count was because he was the only person with a gun on an island with no easy way to leave with hundreds of people. He probably could have done pretty much the same damage with a musket, an axe or even a knife. The best way to reduce his body count would have been to have another gun on the island sooner – Breivik was a coward who didn’t even intend to fight back.

3. After Hitler and Stalin had divided Poland and during the phony war, Stalin demanded and got Estonia to acquiesce to allow Soviet bases in Estonia. Stalin was happy with that for about six months. On 17 June, Soviet forces crossed the border in battle formation to fully occupy the country – resistance was very limited as the president and the generals thought it as hopeless and tried to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.

On the morning of 17 June, as the very first order to the government, the Soviets demanded and the president acquiesced to the confiscation of all guns in private possession. At the time, Estonia was one of two European countries (the other was Switzerland) where there was a military rifle and ammo in every other household.

During the confiscation of guns, the Soviet installed communist government claimed that its intention was to improve civil rights, expand trade and increase education – they vehemently denied any intentions of abolishing private property or any of the other communist actions taken in Soviet Russia. Not surprisingly once the guns were gone the tune changed and the red terror began – this did spark popular armed resistance, but due to lack of guns the effectiveness of the resistance was limited. All in all throughout the occupations and the war a fifth of the population was lost.

Moral of the story: While the population was armed even the communist puppet government with Soviet might behind their back feared the population enough to lie about their intentions and not start anything. Not giving up the weapons would not have saved us from really bad things, but giving up the weapons subjected us to even worse things.

I don’t think Obama is a communist (he is a European style social democrat) nor do I think US is in the imminent threat of being overtaken by a sadistic mass-murdering despot, but I do know that an armed population is the best guarantee to make sure this never happens.

The Europe on the right side of iron curtain had the luxury of having its security and also its democracy guaranteed by the US. Since Europe today is incapable of providing its own security (although of course it should and some countries in Europe are working to make this happen). It is vital for us Europeans that US remains both free and strong as otherwise I very much doubt we could remain free.

kittysaidwoof on January 8, 2013 at 4:45 PM