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March 22, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:21
153 Gun Control Part 2: Facts
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Good afternoon, everybody.
It's Steph.
I hope you're doing well.
It is 3.30 p.m.
on March the 22nd.
I've actually figured it out.
It's a Wednesday, so I'm quite excited about that.
Always good to get your bearing straight, don't you think?
So I've had some comments recently because I did something on foreign aid recently and people seem to kind of like the fact that there was some actually some facts involved.
So I think that that might actually be worth going for here.
So we'll do a little bit of a fact-based review of some certain aspects of gun control.
And I'm going to start just a little bit to sort of get some of the American situation out of the way, because of course I know a lot of the fabulous listeners out there are Americans.
So let's just have a quick look at the Second Amendment.
A couple of things that you should probably know about.
There's no such thing as a community right, of course.
A community right, which is sort of the right to bear arms, is communal.
in the Second Amendment.
No such thing as a community, right?
Because there really are only individuals.
And this phrase, well regulated militia, is often used to justify gun control within the United States context, which is really not valid historically.
Of course, one of the things that needs to be understood is that in the 19th, in the 18th century, sorry, well regulated meant actually well prepared.
So you're supposed to have in these days, right, you're supposed to have a rifle, A pound of gunpowder, 16 balls for your weapon, and you're also supposed to have to be ready to use that weapon within 60 seconds of some alarm being sounded.
This is sort of where the term minuteman comes from.
And militia doesn't mean the National Guard or any state agency, because of course the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, but the National Guard wasn't formed until the early 1900s.
Now, there is lots of statistical evidence that supports the idea that crime increases.
And it doesn't just increase in a straight line.
It increases exponentially whenever gun control is instituted as a state policy.
So, for instance, Washington DC, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles have the strictest gun control policies in the United States.
Now, let me just see if I can't figure this out.
The cities with the highest murder rates are...
Yes, Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
So let's just see if some PhDs out there can't see if they can draw the conclusions about some sort of statistical correlation that might be the case.
But let's look at something that could be considered a little bit more statistically relevant, a little bit more modern, and a little bit more verifiable.
We have in Kennesaw, Georgia, in 1982, the Kennesaw City Council unanimously passed a law that required all heads of households to own at least one firearm with ammunition.
Now, of course, this is not something that I agree with, but it is a sort of fairly well statistically controlled sample to say that every head of household within the city has to have a gun.
So, of course, everybody goes nuts.
They say, oh, there's going to be streets, violence, blah, blah, blah.
Well, what happened, of course?
Well, following the law's passage, the crime rate dropped 89% in the city.
Now, in the state of Georgia as a whole, during this time period, there was a 10% drop.
So it's not like all the teenagers and young hoodlums left for other places.
So Georgia as a whole experienced a 10% drop in crime.
But, in Kennesaw, where you had to have a gun, the crime rate dropped 89%.
So that's, I think, fairly important.
When you think of an 80% drop in crime, you're talking about fewer rapes, fewer murders, fewer thefts, fewer muggings, and so on.
And that's, to me, kind of important.
I'm sort of anti-violence, as you may have figured out by now, and so anything that, to me, contributes or seems to directly cause an 89% drop in crime, I think that's actually quite good.
And actually, the interesting thing is, after it initially dropped this crime rate, it stayed at the same low level.
It has stayed at the same low level ever since.
Now that, I think, is quite important.
Now something that was interesting that happened in this situation.
was that the ACLU actually challenged this law in a federal court just after it was passed.
So in response, the city added a clause which allowed conscientious objectors to exempt themselves from this law, which I think is perfectly nice, except for the fact that it's a government law to begin with.
It's a perfectly nice idea.
This is exactly how DROs would operate as well.
Okay, so what sort of numbers are we actually talking about?
Well, according to the Kennesaw Police Department, city's most recent crime statistics show 243 property crimes per 1,000 residents.
This is 98, so somewhat recent.
crimes per 1000 residents.
This is 98, so sort of recent, somewhat recent.
Now if you look at someplace like Decatur, in 1998, Decatur had 4049 property crimes per 100,000 residents.
That's kind of important too.
So you've got 243 property crimes versus 4,049 property crimes.
That's 3,900 families who are happier and sleep more peacefully at night.
It's 3,900 people who didn't have to file for insurance, which has a ripple effect all over the place in terms of costs.
So this is actually a very good thing.
Anything which contributes to these kinds of reductions in crime statistics, I think, is well worth exploring.
And of course, as you can expect, many people have voted with their feet.
So in 1998, the city's population was just under 15,000, which was up just under 9,000 from 1990.
So 6,000 people moved to this place in an eight-year period, and I'm sure that the low crime had something to do with that.
Now, another thing that you'll hear in the issue of gun control is that, of course, children get hurt by guns.
And it's true.
Of course, children do.
I think about 150 a year in the US, 150 kids a year get injured or killed through guns.
Now, the interesting thing, though, is that these children who do get injured around guns are generally children who have not been brought up around guns.
And that's something that's very important.
I mean, if something is dangerous and you know how to handle it, even as a child, you're going to do a good job of not getting hurt by it.
But if you've never been around a gun, then you know, you're gonna play around with it like it's a toy and then you're gonna get hurt.
But of course, the fact that a particular item hurts children is no reason to call for its banning.
I mean, it's sad that the children get hurt, of course, but it's inevitable and it's going to happen statistically.
For instance, many, many more children die in swimming pools than get hurt through firearms, but we don't talk about banning swimming pools, of course.
But let's break out of our U.S.
obsession and talk about the world as a whole.
So, to a certain untutored mentality, gun control logically would seem to reduce crime.
Well, let's see.
Is that true?
Well, it has been found that on average, countries with the most gun control have the highest crime rates, or the higher crime rates.
Those people who want guns, of course, will still be able to get them illegally, and if you've ever seen criminals interviewed in prison about this issue, they have no problems whatsoever.
$50 and 20 minutes they can get any kind of gun that they're looking for.
So what this means is that the honest people are defenseless against attacks, of course.
For instance, California has some of the strictest gun laws in the U.S.
California also has one of the highest crime rates.
Now the Midwest in the United States has a lower crime rate than that of the Midwest of Canada, even though Canada has stricter gun laws.
Now, it's also thought that the U.S.
has the highest crime rate in the Western Hemisphere, which is just not true.
The highest crime rate actually belongs to countries like Jamaica and Mexico.
Now, their crime rate, especially in murder, is almost twice that of the United States.
And, I'm sure you've guessed this part, Jamaica and Mexico have virtually prohibited gun ownership by private citizens.
So let's cross the pond and have a look at England.
Up to 1981, England had one of the lowest crime rates involving guns in the world.
And, of course, in 1981 they started in on-the-gun control.
It limited access to almost completely to handguns and assault weapons.
Now, from 1981 to 1992, crime rates in England rose almost 200%.
On the other hand, as I've mentioned before, there's Switzerland...
It's one of the lowest crime rates in all of Europe, and it has a law.
Every man aged 18 to 56 has to own an assault rifle, and you have to serve in the military, and you have to keep the rifle at home so you'll practice it.
And this is, of course, one of the things that keeps property crimes in particular so low.
Not many people that keen on breaking into a house where the owner might have an assault weapon and know how to use it.
In fact, in Switzerland, you know that that's the case.
Now, if we look at a country like Israel, we have non-restrictive gun laws coexisting with extraordinarily low rates of gun violence.
And the Israelis respond generally to threats of violence to their community, not by restricting guns, but by urging people to learn to use guns and to carrying them.
So that's another important aspect if you look at the different ways in which societies handle this problem of gun ownership.
Now, since I've been talking a little bit about what happened in Bosnia recently, and I actually have to up the death count to 200,000.
I believed it was 90 to 110.
It's 200,000.
I'm going to read an article from National Review Online by Dave Koppel called When Policy Kills, which was Written on January the published on January the 27th 2003 and I will include this on the board It's a little bit of a long article, but I think it's worth Reading or having me read to you so that you can understand why it is at least I come up with some of this ideas around proving the value of not having gun control So what happened?
I'm going to paraphrase a little bit of this article because it's a fairly long article and also the Serbo-Croatian names are a bit of a mouthful.
So there was, of course, a terrible slaughter in Bosnia, estimated 200,000 dead, 1 million refugees.
This carnage included this massacre at Srebrenica in 1995, which was Europe's worst atrocity since World War II.
They massacred more than 7,500 men and boys at Srebrenica.
This gathered worldwide publicity, and the Bosnian general named Radislav Krcic was actually sentenced to 46 years in prison after his week-long rampage in January 1995.
Now, of course, the real question in part of this general article problem is, how on earth did this occur?
Well, of course, a large share of the blame for Sobrenica was placed on the Dutch government and ill-prepared Dutch peacekeepers.
This was an April 2002 report by the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation.
The Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kock and his entire cabinet resigned in shame a week later.
So, how did this all come about?
Well, of course, the silver mining town of Srebrenica was once part of the Republic of Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was created in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and until the country broke up in 1991, it was the largest nation on the Balkan Peninsula, sort of the size of the state of Virginia.
Now of course Yugoslavia turned into a communist dictatorship in 1945 by Marshal Tito.
Tito died in 80 and his successors feared a civil war so this system was instituted according to which the collective leadership of the government and party offices were kind of rotated annually.
Of course this completely foundered and in 1989 Serbian president Milošević began re-imposing Serb and communist hegemony.
As you can imagine, when communist hegemonies are imposed, Serb Slovenia and Croatia declared independence in June of 1991.
So Slovenia repelled the Yugoslav army in ten days, everything's great, fighting continues in Croatia until December, but the Yugoslav government retained control of about a third of Croatia.
Now, halfway through the Croat-Yugoslav war, the UN Security Council, in their brilliant wisdom, adopted Resolution 713, calling for, quote, a general and complete embargo on all deliveries of weapons and military equipment to Yugoslavia.
This means the rump Yugoslavia plus Croatia and Slovenia.
Now, although sovereign nations are normally expected to acquire and own arms, Resolution 713 redefined this sort of ownership of weapons as illicit in the eyes of the UN.
Now, the sad thing, of course, it's universally understood the Serbs are in control of most of the Yugoslavian army's weaponry.
So the embargo therefore leaves them in a position of complete, well, near-complete military superiority.
Now, conversely, even though the embargo was regularly breached, it left non-Serbs vulnerable.
The UN had, in effect, deprived the incipient countries of the right to self-defense, which, sadly, is a right guaranteed under Article 51 of the UN Charter.
So Macedonia seceded peacefully from Yugoslavia in early 92, but Bosnia-Herzegovina's succession quickly led to a three-way civil war between the Bosnian Muslims, the Bosniaks, Serbs who were Orthodox, and Croats who were Roman Catholic.
The Bosnian Serbs received substantial military support from what remained of old Yugoslavia, consisting of Serbia and Montenegro, and under the control of Slobodan Milošević.
Security Council Resolution 713 now operated to make it illegal for the new Bosnian government to acquire arms to defend itself from Yugoslav aggression.
The whole balance of power thing is just thrown out of the window here.
The Bosnian Muslims were told by the UN that they didn't need weapons of their own.
Instead, they would have immediate access to the upper echelons of UN and NATO peacekeeping forces.
Yeah, doesn't this sound like what they say?
Oh, don't worry, give up your guns, the military and the police will protect you.
Now, of course, the Bosniaks subverted the whole UN arms embargo by importing arms from Arab countries while the US winked.
Of course, most of the arms came from the US to begin with, I'm sure.
At the same time, these Bosniaks tried to play the part of the good guys under the theory that, yeah, we'll garner more territory in the long run if we look like the guys who do what the UN says.
Now, not until 1995 did the Bosniaks begin to achieve arms parity with the Serbs.
And it was the prospect of impending parity, of course, that convinced the Serbs to make this final grand offensive to acquire as much territory as possible before losing their military advantage altogether.
So the reason we're talking about all this is Srebrenica is one result of this final Serb offensive.
The other policy that was completely disastrous was the creation of these sort of safe areas pursuant to Resolution 819, which was adopted by the Security Council in April of 1993.
The safe areas were, quote, regions which should preferably be substantially free of conflict beforehand, where refugees could be offered a reasonable degree of security by a brigade of peacekeeping troops.
The concept of this safe area is this complete pacifist fantasy with little resemblance to the reality on the ground.
I mean, even the US forces aren't safe there.
They can't even protect themselves, let alone anyone else.
In fact, they were kind of regularly taken hostage casually at will without resistance, sometimes in hundreds, hundreds at a time.
These UN hostages would then be used by the Bosnian Serbs to deter the UN and NATO from taking more aggressive action.
Now, while the UN peacekeepers had collected some of the Bosniaks' weapons, the Bosniaks retained the better ones.
With those weapons, they attacked Bosnian Serb villages and civilians, returning afterwards to Bosniak safe areas.
Each successive raid left the Serbs more and more infuriated.
Now, of course, the UN is aware of these raids, totally aware that the Bosniaks had sequestered some weapons, but it took no steps to ensure the safety of the Bosnian Serb civilians.
Now, by the summer of 1995, the population of Srebrenica, a designated safe area, totally swelled with refugees.
By the time of the massacre, it was an island of Bosniaks in a Bosnian-Serb territory, an island the UN had sworn to protect.
Now, when the government or the international government like the UN swears to protect you, what do you think is going to happen?
The UN does not honor its pledge.
As the BBC later reported, quote, a former United Nations commander in Bosnia had told a Dutch parliamentary inquiry into the Srebrenica massacre That it was clear to him that Dutch authorities would not sacrifice its soldiers for the enclave.
And indeed, on July 11, 1995, Bosnian Serb forces entered Srebrenica without resistance from Bosniak or UN forces.
Not a single shot was fired.
The Bosniak general in Srebrenica had been recently recalled by his government, leaving the Bosniak forces leaderless.
Ethnic cleansing and genocide followed.
The men and the boys are separated from the women and then taken away and shot.
Knowing that remaining in the UN sort of safe area would mean certain death some 10 to 15,000 Bosniak males fled into the surrounding forests Escaping to the Bosnian held towns of Tuzla only about three to four thousand were armed mostly with hunting rifles These were the men who survived what has since become known as the six-day marathon of deaths Now, 7500 men and boys are murdered.
Three months after the massacre at Srebrenica, lightning speed for the UN, a unanimous Security Council rescinded its arms embargo against the nations of the former Yugoslavia.
Now here's where things get legally interesting.
The U.N.
Convention on Genocide, which was adopted in 1948 during the Nuremberg Trials, makes complicity in genocide a punishable act.
The U.N.' 's reflexive attempt at disarmament prior to the massacre at Srebrenica might convincingly be argued to fulfill the definition of complicity, a state of being an accomplice, partnership in wrongdoing, and so on.
Now, even if it's not legally complicit, the UN was undeniably functioning as a facilitator of genocide.
So, the UN says, you can't have any arms.
The UN completely bars these people from having arms to defend themselves.
It says, don't worry, we will defend you, and then does absolutely nothing, and these people get massacred.
Sounds like complicity to me!
The UN can't exactly claim ignorance of Serb intent.
Prior to Srebrenica, the international body had knowledge of other mass killings committed by the Serbs against the Bosniaks between 1991 and 1994.
One of the largest of these, April 1992, in the town of Bratunac, just outside of Srebrenica.
350 Muslims tortured and killed by Serb paramilitaries and special police.
So, the UN is fully aware of Slobodan Milosevic's designs for a Greater Serbia, incorporating parts of Bosnia.
The UN was fully aware of the disparity in military capabilities between Milosevic and his intended victims.
And so the UN, by banning them from being able to defend themselves, had every responsibility to defend the Muslims.
If the UN itself could not, at least it had a duty to withdraw the arms embargo and allow them to defend themselves.
This isn't the first time this has gone on, of course.
In the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, there were all these promises made by the UN to protect Rwandan civilians.
Those promises proved just as empty.
There too, the UN personnel knew exactly that the victim groups had been previously disarmed, in this case, in the case of Rwanda, by laws enacted in 1964 and 1979.
So, of course, early on in the genocide, thousands of Rwandan civilians gathered in areas where UN troops had been stationed, thinking, hey, it's a safe area, we're going to be protected.
They weren't.
If the Rwandans had known that the UN troops would withdraw, they would have fled.
Some might have survived.
And this is terrible, of course.
The safe areas gather everyone together to these killing fields and gets everybody passive, thinking they're going to be protected.
And of course, they end up just getting slaughtered and then nicely pulled together by these UN fantasies of being protected.
Now, of course, what happens to people who are responsible for creating genocidal situations within Bosnia and Serbia?
Well, of course, they get promoted.
I mean, this is absolutely natural.
Of course, the people who are on the ground doing it, you know, get thrown in jail, although I think Milosevic just died and his trial was never concluded and he probably was murdered because he ran out of bribe money.
But what happens to everyone else?
Well, upper echelon UN policymakers, no accountability.
Kofi Annan, he served during this period as Undersecretary General for Peacekeeping Operations, gets presented with the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 2001.
The guy should have been indicted!
Likewise, unscathed, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who presided as Secretary General during the time of the Srebrenica massacre.
So in 1998, three years after the Srebrenica massacre, Kofi Annan offers an apology because, you know, that really is great at bringing people back to life.
Quote, The United Nations failed to do our part to help save the people of Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass murder.
In the end, the only meaningful and lasting amends we can make to the citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina who put their faith in the international community is to do our utmost not to allow such horrors to recur.
When the international community makes a solemn promise to safeguard and protect innocent civilians from massacre, then it must be willing to back its promises with the necessary means.
Otherwise, it is surely better not to raise hopes and expectations in the first place, and not to impede whatever capability they may be able to muster in their own defense.
And what does this mean, outside of nonsense speeches?
Well, just months after this show of contrition, Kofi Annan of the UN right back at work preventing prospective genocide victims from preventing themselves.
This time, the victims were the people of East Timor, left unprotected because their firearms had been sequestered at the behest of the UN.
The Timorese were attacked by the Indonesian military and around and around it goes.
I don't know if you know this about the UN, just as sort of an aside, this isn't in the article that I'm paraphrasing, But the governments get paid for sending peacekeeping troops, right?
So it's just, it's a cash, right?
The money goes from the, well, mostly from the US, but from the international community to the governments who are sending the troops.
And of course the governments don't want to get anybody killed.
It's just they're mercenaries, right?
So they want to get paid for their services, but they don't want to actually get harmed in the line of fire.
And we see more of this, this sort of fraud of UN protection.
In May 2000, as Janice Jett explains in Why Peacekeeping Fails, Sierra Leone nearly became the UN's biggest peacekeeping debacle, but 500 peacekeepers there were taken hostage by rebels of the revolutionary United Front, the RUF.
The RUF has been described as a barbarous group of thugs who lift off the country's rich diamond fields and terrorize the population with its signature atrocity of chopping off hands and arms of men, women, and often children.
The RUF troops are unspeakably brutal to civilians, according to this fellow, but will not stand up to any determined military force.
Yet the UN peacekeepers, with few exceptions, handed over their weapons, including armored personnel carriers, and meekly became prisoners.
It was only the deployment of Britain's troops to the former colony that saved civilian lives and averted a complete UN defeat.
And of course, this is what I was talking about with the police and the military.
This is just some schmo.
They don't want to go out there and get killed for the sake of some country they don't even know about.
I mean, so overall, with the UN, just in general, we can do the UN another time, but this is sort of around arms control.
It's difficult to find an organization whose work has facilitated government mass murder of more people in more diverse locations around the world than the United Nations in the past decade, decade and a half, maybe two.
The UN's current campaign to disarm the world's population suggests that the genocides of the previous decade are to be repeated in many other places in the years to come.
Now this is something that's very interesting too.
This is sort of the very interesting point of this.
An email from one of our readers, this is not me, this is the article, from one of our readers encapsulated the horrific consequences of the UN's program to disarm non-state actors.
This is a quote from the email.
In 1999, I spent a year with the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia.
I was stationed in the former safe area Gorzad.
I learned a lot about that war and how the civilians were massacred.
One day we were discussing guns and private ownership.
In response to the statement that the UN believes only the police and military should have guns, a Bosnian exasperatedly asked, Who do you think slaughtered everyone?
I think that just about sums it all up.
Just listen to that, think about that for quite some time.
Only the police and military should have guns, a Bosnian exasperatedly asked, who do you think slaughtered everyone?
This is what happens when you do not have a balance of power.
And a balance of power is always eliminated when gun control escalates.
Now, of course, another way of looking at this is what do dictatorships do when they come into power?
When the Communists took over Bulgaria, September 9th, 1944, they immediately confiscated every weapon in private possession.
In East Germany, private gun ownership was outlawed, although you could get a hunting gun, you could rent a hunting gun for like a one-day period.
Immediately after World War II, Hungary was governed by a coalition of Democrats and Communists.
Now preparing the way for a total Communist takeover, László Rak, the Communist Minister of the Interior, Ordered the dissolution of all pistol and hunting clubs as well as any other organizations which might prove a threat to government power And of course he was acting as he quoted to in order to more efficiently protect the democratic system of the state Now the Poland on the other hand did allow limited ownership of registered gun target guns with a license from the so-called citizens militia
In December 81, Poland's dictator, General Zaroleski, decided that this citizens' militia had gone too far.
He declared martial law.
Arrested all the pro-democracy leaders he could find and ordered all firearms and ammunition to be turned over to the government.
Romania, pretty much the most fierce gun control in the Eastern Bloc.
Nicolae Ceausescu had a dictatorship and a registration list to confiscate all firearms in private hands.
The government also registered but did not confiscate typewriters.
Now, of course, what did our old friends the Nazis do?
Well, of course, as soon as the Nazis gained power, the first thing they'd do was disarm every single opponent they could get their hands on.
The Nazis were terrified of the Jews, and, of course, many of the Jews were frontline veterans of World War I, so they even took away knives and old sabers from the Jews.
Now, of course, the Nazis inherited some 1919 laws from the Weimar Republic, Which, of course, there was a possible communist revolution after Germany's defeat in the First World War, so the Rhein-Weimar Republic enacted the regulation of the Council of the People's Delegates on Weapons Possession.
This is a new law in 1919 that banned the civilian possession of all firearms and ammunition and demanded their surrender immediately.
And this meant that you had to have a license to engage in any type of firearm business.
A special license from the police was needed to either purchase or carry a firearm.
The German police were granted complete discretion to deny licenses to criminals or individuals the police deemed untrustworthy.
And of course, this unlimited police discretion in terms of granting licenses is sort of the foundation of the Brady II proposal, which was introduced by Handgun Control Inc.
It's now called the Brady Campaign in 1994 in the United States.
Now, most significantly, of course, the Weimar law required the registration of just about every lawfully owned firearm in Germany.
And, of course, this is true of the laws of some American states as well.
And what happens is, of course, when the Nazis got into power, they used this registration system to figure out who had arms and to disarm them, Jews in particular, and, of course, other people as well.
So, the Nazis begin disarming the population as soon as Hitler gets into power in 1933.
Of course, the Germans are very big on laws, large volumes of written rules and regulations.
In March 1938, the same month that Hitler annexed Austria in the Anschluss, the Nazis created their own weapons law.
So, in particular, Jews are prohibited from owning any kind of firearms or any participation in any kind of firearms business.
Now, of course, on November 9, 1938, this Kristallnacht pogrom, of course, unarmed Jews all over Germany attacked by government-sponsored mobs.
The government used the administrative authority of the 1938 weapons law to require immediate Jewish surrender of all firearms and edged weapons, and to mandate a sentence of death or 20 years in a concentration camp for any violation.
And if you would like a really graphic example of what exactly happens when the balance of power shifts, and this is from a book, Children of the Flames, Auschwitz survivor Menashe Lorenzi recounts what happened when the Soviet army liberated the camp.
The Russians disarmed the SS guards.
Then two emaciated Jewish inmates, now armed with guns taken from the SS, systematically exacted their revenge on a large formation of SS men.
Now, of course, the SS men are completely disarmed and passively accepted their fate.
Now, after Lorenzi moved to Israel, he was often asked by other Israelis why the Jews had not fought back against the Germans.
He replied, well, many of the Jews did fight.
He then recalled the sudden change in the behavior of the Jews and the Germans at Auschwitz once the Russian army's new, quote, gun control policy changed who had the guns there.
And today, when I am asked that question, he says, I tell people, it doesn't matter whether you're Hungarian, Polish, Jewish or German.
If you don't have a gun, you have nothing.
Now some of this stuff I've pillaged from an article by Dave Koppel, again an NRO columnist, and it's called Hitler's Control, the Lessons of Nazi History, which you can get on the National Review website.
It's a very interesting read.
So let's talk about Jamaica Munn.
So Jamaica has a gun court act in 1974, basically was intended to, quote, take guns off the streets, out of the hands of criminals, and lock up and keep gunmen away from decent society.
And, as you can imagine, as a government program, it has accomplished exactly the opposite.
So, of course, nobody who's law-abiding has guns anymore.
Only the criminals and the state have governments.
Somewhat of an artificial division, but we'll keep it here for now.
It's now, of course, Jamaica's murder rate has since, this stuff has been introduced, is the highest in the world, or one of the highest in the world.
It only lags a little bit behind South Africa and Brazil, according to current UN estimates.
So, of course, rising crime weights were used to justify the Gun Court Act and a variety of other repressive laws.
Crime today is just mind-blowingly out of sight.
And of course, as you would expect, one of the biggest problems you have is police shootings.
So Jamaica's police are just homicidal.
Jamaica's rate of lethal police shootings is among the highest in the world at 5.38 per 100,000 versus about 0.11 in the US.
per 100,000 versus about 0.11 in the US, so 5.38 versus 0.11.
That's higher than the overall homicide rate in many American states and in most European nations, and this is just the Jamaican police force.
Basically, if you join the constabulary in Jamaica, pretty much you have a license to kill.
One out of every two police officers who spend 25 years on active duty, one of them is going to be killing someone in the line of duty suffering no legal or employment repercussions.
Now, tell me if this sounds familiar.
Quote, Because Jamaica's anti-gun laws haven't protected the Jamaican people, and because the police won't protect the Jamaican people, the Jamaican government lacks any plausible moral authority to deprive its citizens of the means of self-defense.
Kingston has degenerated to the Hobbesian nightmare of a war of all against all, aggravated by the government supplying arms to one group of gangs, the police, and enriching other gangs through drug prohibition laws that provide the gangs with their lucrative trade.
That's from Dave Koppel, the NRO columnist, in a column entitled, Jamaica Farewell, the Consequences of Gun Prohibition.
Doesn't it sound a little bit like what happened in Bosnia and the Serbian massacres, wherein you are taken away, your right to defend yourself is taken away, and then the government not only does not defend you against criminals, but preys upon you with the legally armed police force.
Now that it knows that you've been disarmed, it can keep raising taxes and infringing upon your rights.
Now, let's also hear from Tina Terry, who in 1998 wrote an article called How Gun Control Quote Worked in Jamaica.
From 1961 to 1977, my father, who is a white American, as are my mother, sister and I, was stationed with his family and business in Kingston, Jamaica.
Around 1972, the political situation in Jamaica had so seriously deteriorated that there were constant shootings and gun battles throughout the city of Kingston and in many of the outlying parishes.
In years past, no one had even to lock their doors, but now many people hardly dared venture out of their homes.
This was especially true for white people, and even more especially for Americans, because of the real risk of being gunned down or kidnapped and held hostage by Jamaicans, who had become increasingly hostile towards whites and foreigners.
My father took his life into his hands every morning simply driving to work.
Going to the market or to do a simple errand was often a terrifying prospect.
The open hatred and hostility which was directed at us seemed ready at any time to explode into violence, and indeed did so towards many people on many occasions, often with tragic or fatal results.
Now, just before we go on with this, it's important to note that in Jamaica, even before these laws of 1974, only about 1% of the people had guns because there was still a very strong registration process that, of course, kept guns out of the hands of most people.
So, back to the article.
The Jamaican government decided that the only solution to this volatile situation was to declare martial law overnight and to demand that all guns and bullets owned by anyone but the police and the military be turned into the police within 24 hours.
The government decreed that anyone caught with even one bullet would be immediately and without trial incarcerated in what was essentially a barbed wire enclosed concentration camp which had been speedily erected in the middle of Kingston.
In true Orwellian fashion, the government referred to this camp as the Gun Court.
My father and all of our American, Canadian, British and European friends, as well as middle-class Jamaicans of all colours, locally referred to as black, white or beige, knew that we were all natural targets of this kind of draconian governmental punishment.
The relentless anti-American propaganda spewed forth by Michael Manley, Jamaica's admittedly pro-Castro Prime Minister, had resulted in the widespread hatred of Americans, British and Europeans by many Jamaicans.
Racial hatred of whites and beiges, as well as class hatred of anyone who appeared to have money or property, were rampant.
Consequently, we all dutifully and immediately disarmed ourselves and handed our weapons in at the nearest police station.
It was either that or be sent straight to the gun court.
Even after we had disarmed ourselves, we lived in deathly fear that the cops, not known for their integrity and well known for their hatred of whites and Americans, would plant a gun or bullet on our property or persons.
So there we all were, government disarmed, sitting duck, law-abiding citizens and expatriates.
Anyone can guess what happened next.
The rampant and unfettered carnage began in earnest.
Robberies, kidnappings, murders, burglaries, rapes, all committed by the vast populace of still-armed criminals.
Doubtless the criminals were positively ecstatic that the government had been so helpful in creating all these juicy and utterly defenseless victims for their easy prey.
We've all heard the phrase, when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.
I can personally confirm that this statement is absolutely and painfully true, because that is exactly how the Jamaican disarmament worked.
At the time of the disarmament order, I was away at boarding school in the United States.
However, I remember vividly coming home for the summer.
I remember the muted but pervasive atmosphere of tension and terror which constantly permeated our household, affecting even our loyal black servants who worked for and lived with us, and whom we took care of.
Practically every household in Jamaica, except the very poorest, had live-in servants.
There was no welfare or public school in Jamaica, so middle-class families became completely responsible for the well-being of their servants who were considered to be part of the family, including taking them to the doctor and helping them educate their children.
I remember lying awake at night clutching the handle of an ice-pick I had put under my pillow, and listening to the screaming of carloads of Jamaican gangs going by our house, praying that they wouldn't pick our home to plunder.
The favourite tactic was for a group of thugs to roar up to a house, pile out, Batter down the door, and rape, steal, kill, kidnap, whatever they felt like.
They knew the inhabitants had been disarmed, and that they would be met with only fear and defenselessness.
My pathetic ice-pick seemed incredibly puny, but it was all I could think of.
Our family didn't even own a baseball bat.
I remember lying awake thinking about how our beloved dogs were old and feeble, and that they could not protect us, and that I could not protect them either.
I can barely describe the abject terror and helplessness I felt as both a white American and as a young woman during that time.
Jamaica was then about 90% black.
Although I was and still am an American citizen, my family had lived in Kingston for almost 12 years when this situation occurred.
And I considered Jamaica to be my real home.
Many of my friends were Jamaican.
My first serious boyfriend was Jamaican.
For all its faults, I loved this beautiful, suffering land dearly, and felt like a stranger when I was away at school in America, where I was always homesick for Jamaica.
When we had first moved to Jamaica in 1960, my sister and I, both blonde and obviously white, had been able to ride our horses up into the hills, and whenever we encountered local Jamaicans, their salutation to us was open and friendly, as was ours to them.
As things deteriorated into a reign of terror, and then the government instituted overnight citizen disarmament, when we ventured outside our home, we almost always encountered hate-filled stares and hostile hisses of, eh, white bitch, eh, look here, white bitch, and other unprintable epithets.
Jamaica was in the 1970s a country with at least 50% illiteracy and an illegitimacy rate of over 50%.
If a Jamaican girl wasn't pregnant by the age of 15 or 16, she was often derisively branded as a mule, since the offspring of horses and donkeys are almost always sterile.
Being a woman, let alone a white woman, in such a climate, especially after the disarmament of the citizenry by the government, was one of the most terrifying experiences one can imagine.
Now, this article continues, and you can look at it yourself at jpfo.org forward slash Jamaica dot htm.
But she comes up with sort of three or four major points, which I'll read here, which I think are interesting.
1.
The police have no legal duty to protect individual citizens and cannot be held responsible if they fail to do so.
Even if a citizen's 911 call gets through to the emergency center, the police can simply choose not to show up, and the citizen has no legal recourse against the police.
The courts have repeatedly ruled on this.
Number 2.
The police carry guns primarily to defend themselves, not to protect us.
A man's sister couldn't agree more.
Number 3.
Because of items 1 and 2 above, we should all consider the police to be, essentially, historians.
They show up after the crime has been committed and attempt to reconstruct and document the history of the crime.
If the history is satisfactorily reconstructed, then the perpetrator is apprehended, if he can be found, and then, perhaps, prosecuted.
This after the fact law enforcement does little good for the dead or wounded crime victims.
4.
Women have a particular stake in preserving the right to bear arms.
There is no way to describe the helplessness a woman feels when she is disarmed and made helpless by anyone.
Add to that the rage she feels when the agency who is disarming her and leaving her at the mercy of rapists, murderers, goons and thugs is a sanctimonious government telling her that it's, quote, for her own good.
Well, amen, sister.
You go, girl.
This is all very true, of course, and one of the main reasons why you never want to get rid of guns at all.
Now, there's another area here, which is interesting, wherein you can look at the racist origins of U.S.
gun control.
So here's a couple, I'm not going to read them all, but here's a couple of samples.
Slave codes, black codes, economics-based gun bans used to prevent the arming of African Americans 1960 to 19, sorry, 1640 to 1995.
1640.
Virginia.
1640 to 1995.
1640, Virginia, prohibiting Negroes, slave and free from carrying weapons, including clubs.
1640, Virginia-based, race-based total gun ban, that all such free mulattos, Negroes, and Indians shall appear without arms.
And let's see here, in 1712, South Carolina, race-based total gun ban, an act for the better ordering and governing of the Negroes and slaves.
this.
Now, in 1791, of course, the U.S.
Second Amendment to the Constitution ratified reads, quote, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
And in 1792, of course, the blacks are excluded from the militia, i.e., law-abiding males, thus instilled with the right to own guns, Uniform Militia Act of 1792, quote, Called for the enrollment of every free, able-bodied, white male citizen between the ages of 18 and 45 to be in the militia.
Of course, that's pretty important.
We don't want the people who are supposed to be slaves actually having the capacity to bear arms.
What else do we have here?
year.
1806, you cannot sell guns to slaves in Louisiana.
In 1819, South Carolina's master's permission required for gun possession by a slave, so you can't do it without written possession from their master.
In 1819, South Carolina's master's permission required for In 1825, Florida slave and free black homes searched for guns for confiscation.
1828, Florida free blacks permitted to carry guns if a court approves.
1831, Florida race-based total gun ban.
Florida repealed all provisions for firearm licenses for free blacks.
And let's talk about 1831 Maryland raced-based total gun ban.
Maryland entirely prohibits free blacks from carrying guns.
1833 Florida slave and free black homes searched for guns for confiscation again.
1852 Mississippi-based Race-based complete gun ban.
1852, laws of Mississippi 328 forbade ownership of firearms by both free blacks and slaves.
And in 1860, Georgia, there's a complete gun ban for slaves.
slaves in 1866 Alabama race to based race based total gun ban and so on and so on.
You can have a look at this.
I'll post it on the board.
But it's very interesting to me, of course, that it is the blacks and the slaves throughout the Union who first have the right to bear arms taken away from them.
And then in 1902 in South Carolina, there's the first total civilian handgun ban.
Anyway, it's very interesting.
In 1911, New York police choose who can own guns lawfully and so on.
But if you look at the history of all of this, it is the slaves who always get their gun rights taken away first, or never have them instituted at all.
Which should give you I think some sense of the relationship between you and the government when it comes to gun ownership Thank you so much for listening as always.
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