Tyrannical Government--the reality

This is Homs in Syria:

The headline which accompanied this picture reads:
Syrian army crushes key rebel stronghold in Homs

There is this description of the Syrian Army's attack:

“In every single second you can hear the sound of mortars and rockets and air strikes,” said an activist calling himself Abu Rami speaking from Khalidiya. “The regime is so close you hear the sound of them launching the missile, and then you hear them land.”

The Syrian rebels were armed, but seriously outgunned by a force which had an objective of crushing the rebellion:

Last week one rebel fighter said the outlook was so bleak that he and his colleagues went to battle in suicide belts, to detonate should they be captured.

“If we are captured we use it when we are crowded among the soldiers,” said Adnan, 27.

His voice tired and his tone hopeless, Mohammed, the activist who had just managed to flee, said: “Most of my friends have died fighting in Khalidiya these last years. Now I have no news about the ones that are left.”

A truly tyrannical regime has no qualms about wiping out any rebellion, no matter how much force it takes or what kind of force is needed.

Does Halabja mean anything to you?

If the US were truly a tyranny, you would have quietly disappeared in the night never to be heard from again.

Or,  as Matthew White says about the old gun control=genocide argument:

Frankly, this list is a pitifully weak argument against gun control, simply because most of the victims listed here did fight back. In fact, if there's a real lesson to be learned from this roster of oppressions, it's that sometimes a heavily armed and determined opposition is just swept up and crushed-- guns or no guns.

ANSWER: Historical trivia: What was the reason given by the Nazis for Kreystalnacht?

OK, I should accept "(4) all of the above" since to some extent they were all true.

But, the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a official at the German Embassy in Paris, by Herschel Grynszpan on 7 November 1938 was the event which most closely caused Krystalnacht.  The German government retaliated to this event by barring Jewish children from German state elementary schools, indefinitely suspending Jewish cultural activities, and putting a halt to the publication of Jewish newspapers and magazines, including the three national German Jewish newspapers

There is ironic twists to this event:  Vom Rath was a professional diplomat with the Foreign Office who expressed anti-Nazi sympathies, largely based on the Nazis' treatment of the Jews, and was under Gestapo investigation for being politically unreliable at the time he was killed.

But, an act of violence created far more violence.  In fact, looking at Krystalnacht points out the truth of  N. A. Browne's The Myth of Nazi Gun Control:

The Third Reich did not need gun control (in 1938 or at any time thereafter) to maintain their power. The success of Nazi programs (restoring the economy, dispelling socio-political chaos) and the misappropriation of justice by the apparatus of terror (the Gestapo) assured the compliance of the German people. Arguing otherwise assumes a resistance to Nazi rule that did not exist. Further, supposing the existance of an armed resistance also requires the acceptance that the German people would have rallied to the rebellion. This argument requires a total suspension of disbelief given everything we know about 1930s Germany. Why then did the Nazis introduce this program? As with most of their actions (including the formation of the Third Reich itself), they desired to effect a facade of legalism around the exercise of naked power. It is unreasonable to treat this as a normal part of lawful governance, as the rule of law had been entirely demolished in the Third Reich. Any direct quotations, of which there are several, that pronounce some beneficence to the Weapons Law should be considered in the same manner as all other Nazi pronouncements - absolute lies. (See Bogus Gun Control Quotes and endnote [1].)

A more farfetched question is the hypothetical proposition of armed Jewish resistance. First, they were not commonly armed even prior to the 1928 Law. Second, Jews had seen pogroms before and had survived them, though not without suffering. They would expect that this one would, as had the past ones, eventually subside and permit a return to normalcy. Many considered themselves "patriotic Germans" for their service in the first World War. These simply were not people prepared to stage violent resistance. Nor were they alone in this mode of appeasement. The defiance of "never again" is not so much a warning to potential oppressors as it is a challenge to Jews to reject the passive response to pogrom. Third, it hardly seems conceivable that armed resistance by Jews (or any other target group) would have led to any weakening of Nazi rule, let alone a full scale popular rebellion; on the contrary, it seems more likely it would have strengthened the support the Nazis already had. Their foul lies about Jewish perfidy would have been given a grain of substance. To project backward and speculate thus is to fail to learn the lesson history has so painfully provided.

The simple conclusion is that there are no lessons about the efficacy of gun control to be learned from the Germany of the first half of this century. It is all too easy to forget the seductive allure that fascism presented to all the West, bogged down in economic and social morass. What must be remembered is that the Nazis were master manipulators of popular emotion and sentiment, and were disdainful of people thinking for themselves. There is the danger to which we should pay great heed. Not fanciful stories about Nazi's seizing guns.

I would also add that you read this paper for further debunking of the Hitler non-sense.

But, the bottom line is that no one who knows anything about the Second World War and the Third Reich buys into the "Hitler was for gun control."

If anything, Hitler was pro-gun.  He probably would have welcomed armed Jewish resistance as a reason to exterminate the Jews. 

Remember that the usual result of Jewish Ghetto uprisings was a quicker trip to one of the dedicated Operation Reinhard extermination camps (e.g., The survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto were sent to Treblinka).

FYI, the first nation to have an actual gun registration programme was Great Britain (The Gun Licence Act 1870, Pistol Act of 1903, and The Firearms Act of 1920)--Where is the British Genocide?  I would also add that the Home Secretary ruled that self-defence was no longer a suitable reason for applying for a firearm certificate in 1937, and directed police to refuse such applications on the grounds that "firearms cannot be regarded as a suitable means of protection and may be a source of danger"

Historical trivia: What was the reason given by the Nazis for Kreystalnacht?

It's something which tends to fall out of the debate: especially if you are one of those people who think that Arming the Jews might have prevented the Holocaust.  So, the question is:

What was a reason given by the Nazis for Kreystalnacht?

1. They didn't need a reason--they just hated the Jews.
2. They were waiting for the right time to persecute Jews this way
3. The Murder of a German diplomat in Paris by a Jewish person in protest of the Nazi treatment of the Jews.
4. All of the Above

Part of me is interested in seeing your responses, which I probably won't read.  In fact, I have already posted the answer, which  I've set to post tomorrow.

You really think an armed rebellion would succeed?

The violence in the Ukraine is once again fueling the claims that sometimes it's necessary to fight the government (despite the Constitution's plainly saying that it wrong).  But, are armed revolts a good thing?

Max Fisher writes in the Washington Post:

When civil resistance movements popular uprisings adopt small arms use, they become much more likely to fail and the government becomes more likely to survive intact. That was a conclusion I reached, anyway, as part of my graduate research on government crackdowns against popular democratic movements. I surveyed 20 attempted uprisings over the past century and found overwhelming evidence that when protesters take up arms in large numbers they make their movement far likelier to fail. Within those cases, the chance that a popular uprising would "outlast" the government and ultimately secure its goals was cut almost in half if the protesters took up arms.

There a few reasons for this. One of them is that shooting back makes the conflict less about politics and more about simple force, a contest of strength that disorganized civilians are often bound to lose. Probably the biggest is the military: when protesters start shooting back at security services, it makes the military much more likely to intervene against them. And if the military intervenes against protesters, that usually ends things pretty quickly.

Seriously, you are delusional if you think you are going to take on a trained and well-equipped military with an assault rifle.  And the military doesn't need to bring in the drones or MLRS on you as an article in Forbes pointed out:

Benson and Weber (the team sounds like a cigarette brand) explored how the military might domestically apply its concept of full spectrum operations, which cover everything from all-out war to counterinsurgency and nation-building. In fact, the Army’s operating concept for 2016 to 2028  considers highly likely a future where the U.S. is threatened by “radical U.S. citizens operating domestically and abroad”. The Pentagon was probably thinking of Al Qaeda sympathizers in the U.S., but radicals come in all flavors.

There are a few things a successful rebellion needs and one of them is popular support, despite the delusions of the Three Percenters:

To a lesser extent, when protesters take up arms it appears to ultimately reduce popular support for their movement. The hardcore coterie of activists might see the need for armed resistance, but most civilians tend to value their physical security highly, and are more likely to support the government if they believe the opposition is sowing violence. To shoot back is to risk alienating your own "quiet" supporters.

The real point to take away from the WaPo article is that you need both popular support and the backing of the military if you expect to have a serious rebellion.  And despite the so-called oath keepers, the real military oath of allegiance is:

I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God." (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).

Which means a few important things here, with the most important one being that they had better resign from service if they have problems with President Obama.  That is especially true if they want to fall back on the Constitution since Article II, Section ii says:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States;

I've also mentioned that Article III, Section iii of the Constitution defines the crime of treason (the only constitutional crime) as:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.

That means you had better get it straight as to WHERE your loyalties lie if you are in anyway going to claim to be a "constitutionalist" and "oath-keeper".   The real lesson is:

But the military is the big factor here. The protesters need the military to some extent, even if it's only for troops to stay in their barracks. If protesters take up arms, they're much less likely to have military support or even acquiescence. Worse, the military becomes more likely to intervene against them – and the rest of the population becomes more likely to support that.

 See also:
Gun-Rights Activists Ask: What If Ukrainians Had More Guns?
This debunking of the Gun Control =Genocide

Syria's victims

I'm sure that my comment that untrained civvies with guns make up the bulk of the body count in Syria will generate some comments.

I defer to this article: Syria crisis: Counting the victims:

The movement of foreign media and independent human rights organisations has been severely curtailed within the country, making the verification of casualty figures almost impossible.

Recently, the presence of UN monitors has provided another source of information - as with the massacre in the village of Taldou near Houla - but for the most part, the outside world has been reliant on casualty figures supplied by opposition activists.

Syrian government sources and the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency Agency (Sana) have been issuing casualty figures for specific events, but official estimates of the overall death toll have been more sporadic.

If they only had guns--The Georgian Soldiers on Texel

OK, you still think the untrained and underarmed Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto actually stood a chance against the German Army. Nothing's going to change your opinion that a few more guns would have made the day.

Well, How about the Georgian Uprising on Texel (5 April 1945 – 20 May 1945) which was an insurrection by the 882nd Infantry Battalion Königin Tamara (Queen Tamar or Tamara) of the Georgian Legion of the German Army stationed on the German occupied Dutch island of Texel (pronounced Tessel)?

The men of the rebellious battalion were Red Army soldiers from the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic captured on the Eastern front. They had been given a choice rarely offered by the Germans: the captured soldiers could choose either to remain in the POW camps, which would mean almost certain death, or to serve the Germans and be allowed a degree of freedom. The battalion was formed of men who chose the latter option. These were well armed and well trained troops wearing the same uniform as the "enemy".

Preparations began in late March 1945 to move several companies of the Georgian battalion to the Dutch mainland to oppose Allied advances which was the trigger for the rebellion. The battalion of Georgians on Texel revolted, hoping that other German Foreign Legion battalions serving in the German Army along the coast would do the same.

Shortly after midnight on the night of 5-6 April 1945, the Georgians rose up and gained control of nearly the entire island. Approximately four hundred German soldiers were killed in the initial uprising, almost all while sleeping in the quarters they shared with Georgians, who used knives and bayonets. Other German soldiers were shot and killed while standing guard or walking the roads of the island in groups or individually that night and the following day.

Within days, the Germans poured in reinforcements and launched a counter offensive supported by armor. The vicious fighting continued for an entire month, even after the German capitulation in the Netherlands (5 May) and general surrender to the Allies on 8 May. It wasn't until 20 May 1945 when Canadian troops arrived that led to the end of this battle.

The Georgians were unable to overrun two large gun emplacements manned by only German soldiers. These batteries, located in the dunes and overlooking the area where the Georgians were holed up in fixed positions, soon were joined by the heavy coastal artillery of Vlieland and Den Helder, which targeted the rebels, and with them the population of Texel.

The damage on Texel was enormous. Fighting was particularly furious in the Eierland polder where dozens of farms went up in flames. The final stage of the battle was fought around the lighthouse, where several Georgians fought to the end. With much of the fighting over, the Germans then searched the island for rebels. The troops, in a chain link only meters apart, combed the length of the island dragnet style and after two weeks of on/off fighting Texel was "retaken".

Surrender was not an option since captured mutineers were ordered to dig their own graves, remove their German uniforms, and executed. It is also believed that the survivors may have feared facing the same fate as most Soviet collaborators: forced repatriation, under the terms of the Yalta Conference, often followed by incarceration and banishment and, for officers, execution. The 228 Georgians who survived by hiding from the German troops in coastal minefields, or who were concealed by Texel farmers, were turned over to Soviet authorities. After arrival at a collection camp in the Soviet Union, 26 Georgians were singled out and banished together with their families and nearly all others disappeared into Stalin’s Gulags. Those still alive in the mid-1950s were rehabilitated and allowed to return home.

During this fierce battle 565+ Georgians, 120 citizens of Texel, and around 800 Germans lost their lives. Other sources, however, speak of more than 2,000 Germans killed. In 1949 the German War Graves Commission disinterred 812 bodies on Texel (including the 400+ killed in their sleep by the Georgians in their shared quarters) for reburial at Ysselsteyn military cemetery. The numbers given in an early report by the Texel district list "565 Georgians, 120 Texel islanders and approximately 800 Germans killed"; followed by "other sources ... speak of more than 2,000 Germans killed." The "other sources" comment in all probability refers to the Canadian report to SMERSH that lumped together under "casualties" the 1,535 disarmed Germans with their 812 dead.

But, we have to remember that this could be considered an ambush where the bulk of the German dead was killed in their sleep using knives or bayonets, not firearms, during the early part of the uprising.

Additionally, there is only one book on the subject, The Georgian rebellion on Texel (ISBN: 978-9070202330), which is only 72 pages long. That means not a whole lot has been written about the uprising and how it was fought.

Of course, how many people know about Georgian Uprising of Texel?

Jewish Resistance to Nazi oppression

For the most part, there wasn't too much armed resistance to the Nazis from the Jews. First, they were not commonly armed even prior to the 1928 Law. Second, Jews had seen pogroms before and had survived them, though not without suffering. They would expect that this one would, as had the past ones, eventually subside and permit a return to normalcy. Many considered themselves “patriotic Germans” for their service in the first World War. These simply were not people prepared to stage violent resistance. Nor were they alone in this mode of appeasement. The defiance of “never again” is not so much a warning to potential oppressors as it is a challenge to Jews to reject the passive response to pogrom. Third, it hardly seems conceivable that armed resistance by Jews (or any other target group) would have led to any weakening of Nazi rule, let alone a full scale popular rebellion; on the contrary, it seems more likely it would have strengthened the support the Nazis already had. Their foul lies about Jewish perfidy would have been given a grain of substance. To project backward and speculate thus is to fail to learn the lesson history has so painfully provided.

That's not to say that resistance didn't occur, there were a few ghetto uprisings, The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is the best known of the Jewish resistance that arose within the Ghettos in German occupied Eastern Europe during World War II. This was caused by Nazi Germany's effort to transport the remaining ghetto population to Treblinka extermination camp. The uprising began on January 18, 1943. The most significant portion of the rebellion took place from April 19 until May 16, 1943, and ended when the poorly armed and supplied resistance was crushed by the German troops under the direct command of Jürgen Stroop.

The Ghetto fighters (numbering some 400 to 1,000 by April 19) were armed primarily with pistols and revolvers. Just a few rifles and automatic firearms smuggled into the Ghetto were available. The insurgents had little ammunition, and relied heavily on improvised explosive devices and incendiary bottles; more weapons were supplied throughout the uprising or captured from the Germans. Some weapons were hand-made by resistance: sometimes such weapons worked, other times they jammed repeatedly. In his daily reports, Stroop wrote his forces were able to recover the "booty" consisting of:

• April 20, 1943:...In today's action we caught, apart from the Jews reported above, considerable stores of incendiary bottles, hand grenades, ammunition, military tunics, and equipment.
• April 22, 1943:...captured 80 incendiary bottles and other booty.
• April 23, 1943:...We captured apart from valuables and money - some gas masks.
• April 24, 1943:..and an amount of paper money, especially dollars was captured; this money has not yet been counted.
• April 25, 1943:..and in one bunker 3 pistols and explosive charges were captured. Further today, significant supplies of paper money, currency, gold coins and items of jewelry were secured.
• April 26, 1943:...Once again, weapons, Molotov cocktails, explosive devices and large amounts of money were captured.
• April 27, 1943:...In this operation we captured 3 rifles, 12 pistols, partly of heavier caliber, 100 Polish "pineapple" hand grenades, 27 German steel helmets, quite a number of German uniforms, tunics and coats which were even furnished with ribbon of the East medal, some reserve magazines for machine guns, 300 rounds of ammunition, etc.
• April 28, 1943:..capturing more arms, ammunition, and military equipment
• April 29, 1943:..Captured are 2 rifles, 10 pistols, 10 kilograms of explosives, and ammunition of various types
• April 30, 1943:..Today, we again captured arms and particularly parts of German uniforms from them.
• May 2, 1943:...arms and ammunition captured.
• May 3, 1943:...We captured among other things, one German rifle, model 98, two 08 pistols and other calibers, also home-made hand grenades.
• May 4, 1943:.. We captured 1 carbine, 3 pistols, and some ammunition.
• May 5, 1943:..Today, we again captured arms and ammunition, including one pistol.
• May 6, 1943:..One Jew who had escaped from Lublin was caught just outside of the Ghetto wall. He was armed as follows: 1 08 pistol, ample reserve ammunition, 2 Polish "pineapple" hand grenades.
• May 7, 1943:..We captured 4 pistols of various calibers and some stores of ammunition.
• May 8, 1943:..We captured about 15 to 20 pistols of various calibers, considerable stores of ammunition for pistols and rifles, moreover a number of hand grenades, made in the former armament factories.
• May 9, 1943:..Again we captured some pistols and hand grenades.
• May 10, 1943:..Today, we again captured small arms and some ammunition.
• May 11, 1943:..Considerable amounts of food were captured or secured, in order to make it more and more difficult for them to get necessary food...We captured several pistols, hand grenades, and ammunition.
• May 13, 1943:..Booty: 6 pistols, 2 hand grenades, and some explosive charges.
• May 14, 1943:..some pistols, among them one of 12-mm caliber, were captured. In one dugout inhabited by 100 persons, we were able to capture 2 rifles, 16 Pistols, some hand grenades and incendiary appliances. Of the bandits who resisted, some again wore German military uniform, German steel helmets and "knobelbecher." Apart from the carbines. we captured 60 rounds of German rifle ammunition...Booty: rifles, pistols and ammunition. Further, a number of incendiary bottles (Molotov cocktails).
• May 15, 1943:.. We captured 4 pistols of larger calibers, 1 infernal machine with fuse, 10 kilograms of explosives, and a considerable amount of ammunition.
• May 24, 1943:

Seven Polish rifles, one Russian and one German rifle, 59 pistols of various calibers, several hundred incendiary bottles, home-made explosives, infernal machines with fuses, a large amount of explosives and ammunition for weapons of all calibers, including some machine gun ammunition. Regarding the booty of arms, it must be taken into consideration that the arms themselves could in most cases not be captured, as the bandits and Jews would, before being arrested, throw them into hiding places or holes which could not be ascertained or discovered. The smoking out of the dug-out by our men, also often made the search for arms impossible. As the dug-outs had to be blown up at once, a search later on was out of the question.

So, the Jews were able to acquire firearms and other weapons despite Nazi "Gun Control". If they didn't get them prior to the uprising, they could have been able to have captured weapons from the defeated Nazis. Additionally support from the Polish Underground also provided the insurgents with a limited number of badly needed weapons and ammunition from its meager stocks. Jewish fighters from the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW) received only from the National Security Corps (PKB) underground police force: 2 heavy machine guns, 4 light machine guns, 21 submachine guns, 30 rifles, 50 pistols, and over 400 grenades. The Polish Resistance also disseminated information and appeals to help the Jews in the ghetto, both in Poland and by way of radio transmissions to the Allies.

The problem, the Nazi troops were far better armed and had the ability to resupply, which the Jews in the Ghetto were not.

The upshot:
3,000 Jews were killed in the ghetto during the uprising (some 6,000 among them were burnt alive or died from smoke inhalation). Of the remaining 50,000 residents, most were captured and shipped to concentration and extermination camps, in particular to Treblinka.

Germans 17 killed and 93 wounded.

Sometimes a heavily armed and determined opposition is just swept up and crushed — guns or no guns. And those who aren't prepared to fight are just crushed.

Despite your giving firearms a godlike quality,they cannot protect you in all circumstances. A firearm is useless against an enemy that is better trained and equipped: especially if that equipment includes armour, artillery, guided missiles, drones, etcetera.