After WWII there must have been a lot of guns floating around, automatic weapons and explosives, in the hands of some people with extreme political views. How were all these weapons removed from circulation? Was it a voluntary surrender by irregular forces fighting the Nazis, a draconian crackdown or some sort of payment to remove weapons from society. I know that Eastern Europe was under Soviet control so I could believe draconian measures there but what about France, Belgium or Holland? I also know that Greece had a civil war in 1946.
So what laws were passed to try and get WWII weapons off the streets of postwar Europe?
You don’t say where you’re from, but most posters here are from the US.
As many debates on gun control have shown, there is a clear cultural difference between the US and most of Europe (certainly with the UK).
Here in England, the beat police don’t have guns.
Guns are not allowed for home defence.
There are massive restrictions on all guns, including handguns.
All this is very popular and there are no signs of any changes.
So the answer to your question is that when my father came home from the war, he handed his rifle in. Why wouldn’t he? No laws were needed.
Apart from being a soldier in war-time, none of my family have ever owned or fired any gun*. The only guns you ever see are anti-terrorist police at major airports.
*I confess that I have:
fired a shotgun in Canada (I hit a bucket over 20 feet away!)
fired a .22 rifle at my school’s shooting range (only feasible in Private Schools)
am going clay-pigeon shooting tomorrow (I’m on holiday in Africa)
Well there was this little thing called a war, and the armed guys got the pulp beaten out of them until they said uncle.
Disarming a group or a population is easy and has been done many times. Hell in Africa and other places UN peacekeepers have routinely disarmed tribes and groups, often people with a far greater “heritage” of gun use and knowledge about guns, and usually these are assualt rifles anyway. US citizens can be disarmed as well, if at a time there is the political will to do what has to be done.
In W Europe the resistance had been unable to do much against the Germans in anycase, so they were either i) dead, ii) hiding and glad to see the allies. I E Europe, some groups of partisans were a problem for the Soviets until the 50’s. In SE Europe and the balkens, saw the most successful partisan activity, they pretty much succeded in driving the GErmans out and the partisans became the government (Tito) or there was a war between the various groups (Grecee).
On further reading, anti-Japanese resistance forces in Malaysia officially turned in their weapons to the British after WWII only to start a guerrilla war against the British in 1948 with weapons kept from the government.
If you want to know about Germany, I don’t think there were any tendencies to keep guns for militia uses after the war.
Of course the occupational forces searched houses and so on, and you were in trouble if guns were found, but the main thing was that no-one wanted to fight any more.
People stopped thinking of the occupational troops as the enemy amazingly quickly (to a lesser extend vice versa as well).
Here in Norway people are still delivering WWII era weapons (machine pistols like the MP-40 and hand granades among other things) to the police today. I don’t think there ever was a concentrated drive to “disarm” the populace after the war, probably because the authoritites figured most people holding on to WWII weapons had been in the resistance or army, and therefore could be trusted with the firearms.
During the mid-90’s (if memory serves) - Norwegian authorities started a series of “weapon drives” so to speak - in which people could deliver whatever weapons/explosives they had to the police without fear of retribution. This lead to all sort of newspaper stories about elder women showing up at police stations with live grenades in their purses and such.
Political will is a polite way of saying ignore the constitution and the will of a significant amount of the population? And I’m not sure it would be as easy as you seem to think.
Political will means that a significant amount of the population has changed their minds. If enough of them change their minds, we could even repeal the second amendment.
There must have been thousands of weapons and other military equipment lying around in Europe during the war for just about anyone to pick up.
Rapidly advancing armies and especially hastily retreating armies would leave stuff behind for the locals to come and just pick up, and even if the general population was fed up with fighting there would still have been a significant number of people wanting a souvenir.
I would speculate that if the arms in question could not be kept or used openly then they would be of limited utility. If they stay stashed in the attic forever then effectively they don’t exist. If you can’t legally buy ammunition for them then you can’t practice regularly or have more than a limited reserve of rounds. I imagine that plenty of vets and former partisans kept souvenirs, but other than maybe being able to confront a burglar they ceased to be relevant. I mean, wtf would I do with a grenade launcher if I illicitly possessed one?
anybody who surrendered to the other side handed their weapons in,
anybody who had joined with his own weapons and didn’t surrender got to keep them (either to put them back in the closet and take them only for hunting, or to join the “maquis”)
anybody who was still in the army or in a gun-bearing branch of the police at the end of the civil war still needed his army-issued weapons, as they happen to be a tool of the trade.
I imagine it must have been similar for Places Beyond The Mountains, once their own little ruckus was over. Many of the “maquis” had been involved with different sides of WWII and didn’t come join the “maquis” until after WWII was over.
Yes, but it wouldn’t be necessary since the obvious reading of the second amendment is that only the state militia (i.e. National Guard) have a constitutional right to bear arms. This is not a popular view, of course, but it is a reasonable one and, if the political will changed, I think the courts woulds see it that way too.