Guns Prevent Tyranny

This blog contains excerpts from the book “Fighting Back” from Eric Pratt, Senior Vice President of Gun Owners of America.

The Second Amendment is not about duck hunting. And no Founding Father ever said “One if by land. Two if by sea. The deer are coming! The deer are coming!”

A former mayor of Boston once said “I can’t imagine a single sports hunter who needs an AK-47 or an Uzi to shoot deer.” I can just see Yoda saying “The stupidity is strong in this one.”

The Second Amendment is not about deer hunting. Owning guns is not a (government-issued) privilege. It is a God-given right of the people to protect themselves from their own government.

James Madison, known as the Father of the Constitution, said in Federalist 46 that:

The Constitution preserves “the advantage of being armed, which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation. . . [where] the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”

So why are these world governments afraid to trust the people with arms? It’s very simple. They’re afraid because if they were to start abusing an armed people, then the people would shoot back. How many times have we heard stories of bullies continuing their bullying until the victims fight back? The Supreme Court addressed this issue in the DC vs. Heller decision of 2008. On pages 24 and 25 of that very famous decision, the Supreme Court said that the right to keep and bear arms – is essential to “resist tyranny”.

To argue with anti-gun liberals on this issue, one must go back and revisit our own country’s history. The Revolutionary War began on April 19, 1775 at the battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. The colonial militia was made up of average people: farmers, storekeepers, blacksmiths, doctors, etc. They stood up bravely to the what has been argued as the best fighting force of their day – the British Redcoats. But why did they feel they needed to stand up to the Redcoats? What was so atrocious that they needed to stand up with guns? The Redcoats were attempting to confiscate the guns and gun powder of the colonists in Concord. But the colonists did not simply prevent the confiscation of guns and powder. The colonists knew that if they gave up their guns, freedom and independence would be lost. They beat the Redcoats so badly that the Redcoats threw their guns in a nearby pond and fled for their lives.

An armed people do not have to be stronger than their oppressor. They simply need to serve as a credible deterrent.

Let’s look at another smaller, but credible deterrent. Take Switzerland for example. The biggest testimony to the right to bear arms came in World War II. The only country Adolf Hitler did not attack was Switzerland. Every other country he conquered had a standing, professional army. Why did he not attack Switzerland?

Every Swiss male between the ages of 20 to 55 must serve 17 weeks of training in the Swiss army. At the end of his training the recruit returns home, and brings home with him the fully automatic rifle he trained on, an allotment of ammo, his uniform, a military pack and a CBR mask.

And on a personal level, any wonder why Switzerland has the lowest crime rate in the world!  Everyone is heavily armed! So, for the Swiss, it has been this way for hundreds of years. This concept has helped Switzerland from being sucked into the many wars which have ravaged Europe.

Also, what is not widely known is that Switzerland is loaded with actual hidden underground bunkers, with heavy artillery aimed at its roads at key border crossings. Had Hitler attempted to drive Panzers into Switzerland, the Wehrmacht would have been annihilated by that artillery.

This was best explained by General George Patton:

“Even Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht (army) which conquered all of Europe in the early months of World War II, chose not to attack Switzerland, despite the fact that the small country was in the crossroads of Western Europe…. In a classic example of dissuasion at work, Hitler’s general staff recommended against an invasion on the grounds that the costs would be disproportionate to the gains… In short, Switzerland is an armed bunker…”

If you haven’t yet figured it out yet, gun confiscation is a prelude to genocide. There was a study done years ago by the Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO) which analyzed seven (7) major genocides in the 20^th century:

• Turkey
• Soviet Union
• China
• Germany
• Guatemala
• Uganda
• Cambodia

In every one of these atrocities, gun confiscation preceded genocide!

Most people are not up to speed with the genocide in Cambodia, so let me fill you in. In the 1970s, this country suffered the worst genocide of those listed above, as a percentage of the population…way more than Germany in World War II. Almost one third of the population was murdered by a Marxist government, known as the Khmer Rouge, and its despotic leader, Pol Pot.

What happened? First the government confiscated firearms from law-abiding citizens. Then, they slaughtered them. An eyewitness said this to New Yorker magazine:

“[The] first Khmer Rouge soldiers to arrive came on trucks from the forest, with other soldiers running behind them. The trucks stopped in the marketplace. [Mrs.] Eang watched soldiers stride onto the porches of the houses and knock on the doors and ask the people who answered if they had any weapons. The soldiers said ‘we are here to protect you and no one has a need for a weapon anymore’.

“People who owned no weapons were forced to stand aside and allow the soldiers to look for themselves. The roundup of weapons took nine or ten days, and once the soldiers concluded that the villagers were no longer armed, they dropped their pretense of friendliness.

“The soldiers said that everyone would have to leave the village for a while, so that the troops could search for weapons; when the search was finished, they could return.”

Once the civilians were disposed of their firearms, the massacres began.

The JPFO interviewed Holocaust survivor, Thomas Haas, who spent time in Dachau concentration camp. “Before Adolf Hitler came to power, there was a black market in firearms, but the German people were so conditioned to be law-abiding, that they would never consider buying an unregistered gun. The German people really believed that only hoodlums owned such guns. What fools we were… There is no doubt in my mind that millions of lives could have been saved if the people has not been ‘brainwashed’ about gun ownership and had been well armed. Hitler’s thugs and goons were not very brave when confronted by a gun. Gun haters always want to forget the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which is a perfect example of how a rag tag, half-starved group of Jews took up 10 handguns and made assholes out of the Nazis.”

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