gun ban history

[Strafer Gott]

Manta, after the potato famine, I would have expected a cut deeper on the genocide issue.
The Stroop Report tells the story of the Warsaw Ghetto. It seems a handful of Hebrews with some ratty old handguns made the Wehrmacht back up. Too many casualties for fighting "unarmed Jews". Of course, the Nazis then leveled the place with concentrated artillery. History abounds with genocides, It's not like ancient history. It repeats.

[I'vebeenduped]

I love to read everyone's thoughts on this subject. I am certainly NOT the subject matter expert here, however, do we really need to look any further than Athens, Tennessee in 1946?? I have not seen anything debunking this story, so excuse me if I am bringing up something null and void. Here is a CLEAR story of an armed citizenry reacting to governmental, albeit at a local level, abuse.

[JimDandy]

Now - for God's sake, if we want to look intelligent - drop the line about the Japanese not invading America. There is no scholarly source for the quote. The Japanese plans were and are well known. There was NO plan to invade the US - ever. The quote is probably false and cannot be attributed to a legit source.

Not in the way you mean that "they" mean, but not only is there scholarly evidence that Japan intended to invade American shores, there's empirical historical evidence that they did in fact succeed in invading American shores.

As a feint as part of the battle for Midway, a small force did invade parts of Alaska.

[btmj]

Well, what JimDandy says is true. The Japanese did attack the Aleutian Islands, and intended to conquer some of them. At the time, Alaska was not a state. There was never a plan, strategy, or goal of the Japanese Empire to invade or conquer any part of the 48 states of the United States. Their goal was to push America’s sphere of influence back to the shore of California by eventually taking Hawaii. They wanted to push the British out of SE Asia and Indonesia.

It is important to realize that genocide is a twentieth century term. Prior to 1930, wholesale slaughter of enemy populations was often used as part of war. Sure it was considered un-gentlemanlike, but it happened pretty often. The Thirty-Years War is an example of extreme brutality, and if those people (Prussian, Austrians, Swedes etc.) had been given access to gas chambers and cluster bombs, they no doubt would have achieved Hitler-like levels of atrocities. They just had to make do with hacking and beating of helpless civilians, along with policies of enforced famine. In more ancient times, Julius Caesar achieved peace in Gaul (France) by defeating what we would today call a guerilla insurrection. How did he achieve peace? He slaughtered 1/3 of the population, enslaved 1/3 of the population and shipped them back to Rome, and the remaining 1/3 were happy to live under Roman authority. The point is this: What makes Hitler, Lenin/Stalin, Mao, The Japanese Imperialists, and Pol-Pot so utterly evil to us is not that they behaved in an uncharacteristically bad way. No, we are horrified that the rest of the world moved beyond its barbarous past, and they did not. They applied their medieval mindset using industrial war technology.

Throughout human history, barbarism and despicable brutality has been the rule, not the exception. Only within the last century has it become rare enough to be considered “beyond the pale”, and only in the most advanced of cultures. Given human nature, I doubt we have seen the last of genocide and industrial-level slaughter. It emerges with predictable regularity whenever there is a societal breakdown. Anyone who argues that the Human Race has evolved beyond barbarism, and that genocide is no longer a risk, is naïve at best… willfully myopic or delusional at the worst.

[btmj]

I've seen it argued numerous times that an armed populace such as ours still does not have the might to stand up to an organized professional army. What this arugment ignores, however, is that a resistance movement needs not defeat an invading army head-on to be successful

I agree with Webley's thoughts here... In addition, an armed subculture (be it ethnic or religious minority, or political minority as in communist states) need not fight the military head-on, because the oppression builds gradually. During WWII, the French and the Greek resistance movements started with old pistols and antique rifles, but that enabled them to get explosives and detonators, along with more modern firearms. By the time the Nazi's realized they needed to clamp down hard, it was too late, and the insurrection was organized, armed, and effective.