So what’s the matter with gun registration?
Turkey did not enjoy a smooth transition from being the seat of the collapsing Ottoman Empire, through World War I and into the modernist Ataturk era. In those turbulent times, ethnic Turks, Muslims composing the vast majority of the population, considered their Christian minorities, especially the Armenians, to be disloyal and treacherous.
In 1911, a national gun registration law was passed in Turkey, with no apparent ill intention beyond increasing public safety. In 1915, during the Great War, these gun registration lists were used to disarm the Armenian and other Christian populations. Army battalions cordoned off entire towns and did gun sweeps. Once disarmed, the official state violence visited against the Armenians ratcheted up to murderous levels.
Only after the Armenians were disarmed and helpless to resist did the final step begin: the officially sanctioned and conducted wholesale “deportation” of the Christian minorities from Turkey. These “deportations” were in reality forced marches into fiery deserts without food or water. The stragglers who could not keep up with the forced-march columns were killed by Turkish soldiers with bullets, bayonets, and swords until the columns were no more and the “deportation” missions were complete.
Between 1915 and 1923, one and a half of the two million Turkish Armenians were murdered, along with a half million other Christians. (The Turks deny to this day that it happened, just as some deny the later Nazi holocaust.) But even after conducting this first modern mega-death holocaust, Turkey was not expelled in disgrace from the community of nations. There was no Western boycott of the new Turkish state. Adolf Hitler noticed this 20th-century indifference to genocide, and so did Lenin, Stalin, and other despots. It was an important lesson for future dictators, leading to even greater mass murders under the Nazis and Soviets.
And the Nazis and the Communists learned another crucial lesson from the Turks: national gun registration laws could be passed in the name of dubious “public safety,” and the registration lists could be used later to disarm selected minorities, and then subsequently to arrest, deport, and murder them by the millions after they were helpless to resist.
In the Turkish case, only a small clique understood the true purpose behind the gun registration and laws of 1911. If average Turks thought about the new gun laws at all, they probably believed they would lead to greater public safety, as advertised. That was also generally the case with the Russians, Germans, Chinese, Cambodians, Guatemalans, Ugandans, Rwandans, and all the rest who were required first to register their firearms for “public safety,” and who accepted the demand at face value as a “reasonable” gun control measure.
American liberals who would like to see the Second Amendment torn out of the Constitution as a problematic relic of a bygone era generally do not know—or pretend not to know—this well-established historical pattern. But American Constitutionalists, who are more often than not students of history, understand the pattern very well.
So, directly behind the insane faces of contemporary villains like Loughner, Holmes and Lanza, we see the smirking faces of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, tyrants who did not murder individual victims by the fives and tens, but entire populations by the tens of millions. And in each case, these national genocides were preceded by gun confiscation that was made possible by national firearms registration laws sold to a gullible population in the name of “public safety.”
From “Dear Mr. Security Agent” by Matt Bracken, January 7, 2013
http://westernrifleshooters.wordpress.com/2013/01/07/bracken-dear-mr-security-agent/
Bump