The true history of gun control - Timeline
Wednesday, February 27, 2013 by: J. D. Heyes
(NaturalNews) Throughout the history of the world there have been despots, tyrants, dictators and kings who have imposed their will over those they conquered. After defeating rival armies in battle, many of these rulers went on to lead cruel, ruthless and abusive regimes largely by keeping the subjugated powerless to resist.
Men like Alexander the Great, king of Macedonia; Genghis Khan, who founded and ruled the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his demise; the Caesars of the Roman empire; and the pharaohs of the Egyptian empire all conquered, then kept power, by ruling with iron fists over people who were powerless to resist because they did not have the means to do so. In feudal England, British subjects in Scotland, Ireland and elsewhere were forbidden to bear arms, and as such were forced to remain loyal to the crown (until they won their independence by force of arms).
In more recent times the invention and mass production of the firearm made conquering - and then controlling - entire populations much more difficult, which is why the most heinous despots in the last 150 years have moved to limit or ban access to guns. In our own country, prior to the Revolutionary War, some colonists did own firearms but in the months before, and directly after, the war began King George's generals implemented gun confiscation policies - a primary driver behind the adoption of the Second Amendment by our founding fathers.
As gun control once more becomes an issue, and as some lawmakers, academics, pundits and ordinary Americans call for outright gun bans and confiscation in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in mid-December, it is vital and appropriate to examine the history of gun control around the world, and the carnage visited upon the innocent by gun-grabbing tyrants.
Soviet Union - 1929 -- Soviet Russia was established following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, when ruling Czar Nicholas II tossed 11 million Russian peasants into World War I. Frustrated and angered by the loss of life, scores of armed Russians - many current or former Russian soldiers who were led by Marxist Vladimir Lenin - rebelled against a ruling regime that was already teetering on the edge of collapse.
Firearms were allowed to remain in the hands of Soviet citizens until 1929, when private gun ownership was abolished - a time which saw the rise of one of the world's most repressive regimes, that was led by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin (he ruled from 1941-1953 but was entrenched in the country's leadership by 1928).
From 1929 to the year Stalin died, tens of millions of Soviet dissidents or anyone the country's leadership believed were a threat, were rounded up and either murdered or placed in labor camp/prisons and forced to work, sometimes to their deaths. Early in Stalin's political career, he launched two national collectivization campaigns in order to transform the country into an industrial power. Both campaigns, however, were rife with murder on a massive scale.
"In 1932-33, Stalin engineered a famine (by massively raising the grain quota that the peasantry had to turn over to the state); this killed between six and seven million people and broke the back of Ukrainian resistance," says a history of his political career at Gendercide.org. "The Five-Year Plans for industry, too, were implemented in an extraordinarily brutal fashion, leading to the deaths of millions of convict laborers, overwhelmingly men.
His "callous disregard for life" was matched only by his paranoia; later, he purged the Communist Party itself of anyone and everyone he believed was a threat - all under the auspices of a total gun ban.
"If the opposition disarms, well and good. If it refuses to disarm, we shall disarm it ourselves," he once said.
The Ottoman Empire - 1911 -- The Ottoman Empire, the origins of which were in Turkey, implemented full gun control in 1911. A few years later, beginning in 1915 and lasting until 1917, some 1.5 million Armenians (out of a total of 2.5 million) living within the empire were rounded up and murdered by the "Young Turks" of the ruling class. In what has since been called the Armenian Holocaust, "Armenians all over the world commemorate this great tragedy on April 24, because it was on that day in 1915 when 300 Armenian leaders, writers, thinkers and professionals in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) were rounded up, deported and killed," says a short history of the slaughter by the University of Michigan. "Also on that day in Constantinople, 5,000 of the poorest Armenians were butchered in the streets and in their homes."
The Ottoman government established "butcher battalions" which consisted primarily of violent criminals who had been released from prison just to kill ethnic Armenians. Those who were members of the army (which was currently fighting the Allies in World War I) "were disarmed, placed into labor battalions, and then killed," said the university history.
Germany - 1938 -- Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany established gun control in 1938, just prior to the implementation of his horrendous, murderous campaign to exterminate the Jews. In the end, 13 million Jews and other perceived lesser races were killed by Hitler and his Nazi Party.
In 1942, at the height of the Second World War and German advances, Hitler said:
The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.
China - 1935 -- The Nationalist Chinese government established gun control in 1935, just two years before Japan invaded in 1937. In the period from 1935 to 1952, some 20 million citizens and political dissidents were murdered. The Chinese Cultural Revolution, which was launched by the country's supreme ruler, Mao Zedong, took place from 1966-1976, and "claimed the lives of several million people and inflicted cruel and inhuman treatments on hundreds of million people," says MassViolence.org. "However, 40 years after it ended, the total number of victims of the Cultural Revolution and especially the death toll of mass killings still remain a mystery both in China and overseas." The actual figures remain a highly-classified state secret.
Regarding gun control, Mao once said: "War can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun."
Cambodia - 1956 -- The year this Asian nation issued its total gun control edict was in 1956, but the real carnage did not begin until several years later, during the regime of the demonic Pol Pot. Between 1975 and 1977, his regime murdered as many as 1 million "educated" people whom he believed represented a threat to his power in "killing fields" that were later depicted in a movie by the same name.
In all, more than 56 million people around the world have been murdered as a result of gun control laws imposed by rulers and despots who knew that the only way they could continue to brutalize their own people and stay in power was by disarming them.
And now left-wing pols, politicians, academics and pundits want our leaders to have the same ability to rule unopposed and unafraid of reprisal.
"Our forefathers did not arm the American people for the purpose of hunting, but rather to protect themselves from those who were doing the hunting, namely the tyrant King George," writes Bradlee Dean for WorldNetDaily.
Anyone truly interested in preventing mass murder should not be a supporter of gun control.
Sources:
Bolshevik Revolution: 1917
Gendercide Watch: Stalin's Purges
FACT SHEET: ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
Gun control, dictator-style
Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence
