[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by Shawnski

Here are some that cannot reply "hi" back as they were disarmed and could not defend themselves...

The Armenians from the Ottoman empire (Turkey),
Ukrainian farmers under Stalan,
Chinese under Mao,
Jewish under Hitler,
Cambodians under Paul Pot,
Ugandans under Idi Amin,
Tutsi in Rwanda,
Mayan Indians in Guatemala,
Buddhist monks in Tibet...
The list goes on...

10's of millions...

Are you just trolling, or do you seriously believe the fairy tale that armed civilians could rise against a tyrannical government and win? Let's take a look at your example of the Jews living in Nazi Germany. What percentage of Germany's Jewish population even owned firearms when Hitler came to power? Of the few that did, do you think they could have successfully mounted a partisan campaign against Germany's armed forces? Do you honestly believe that the same military power that easily conquered Poland and France could have been defeated by a loosely-organized and lightly-armed Jewish militia? Or that Tibetan monks (how many of them own firearms, I wonder) could have posed a serious opposition to the People's Liberation Army? Or that Soviet peasants could have overthrown Stalin?

It makes for a neat movie plot to imagine that the Wolverines can successfully wage a guerrilla war against the Red Army, but you're deluding yourself if you think that is anything close to a viable scenario.

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/11/stop..._about_hitler/

In his 1994 book, NRA head Wayne LaPierre dwelled on the Hitler meme at length, writing: “In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.”

And it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense: If you’re going to impose a brutal authoritarian regime on your populace, better to disarm them first so they can’t fight back.

Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.

[...]

Besides, Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done better?” he told Salon.

[...]

“As for Stalin,” Bartov continued, “the very idea of either gun control or the freedom to bear arms would have been absurd to him. His regime used violence on a vast scale, provided arms to thugs of all descriptions, and stripped not guns but any human image from those it declared to be its enemies. And then, when it needed them, as in WWII, it took millions of men out of the Gulags, trained and armed them and sent them to fight Hitler, only to send back the few survivors into the camps if they uttered any criticism of the regime.”

Bartov added that this misreading of history is not only intellectually dishonest, but also dangerous. “I happen to have been a combat soldier and officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and I know what these assault rifles can do,” he said in an email.

He continued: “Their assertion that they need these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its leaders.”