Well, let’s say the fantasy is that one person with one gun can change the world, that every gun owner imagines himself a potential hero who saves the world from a dictator, becomes a hunter of fascists.
ha-ha-ha
Nazi firearms policy was a mixed bag.
They did relax the actual law. Increasing gun ownership and proficiency was an official goal. After their reforms the average adult non-jewish person could buy all the long arms they wanted over the counter (permit and registration required for handguns, just as before.) They introduced firearms training in the mandatory Hitler Youth as well as at least some schools and of course they had conscription even in peacetime. They also issued service weapons to more people.
On the other hand by executive decree they denied Jews the necessary “reliability”, putting them in the same position as convicted felons or the mentally ill. They did seize their firearms and they used handgun registration data in the process.
So, take your pick.
(Btw. even today after decades of much more restrictive laws and changed cultural attitudes both the number of privately owned firearms and the number of households with firearms per capita are about a third of the numbers in the US. Sure, that’s a lot less, but not really the orders of magnitude that people on both sides of the Atlantic tend to imagine.)
Hi-cool site.
Funny enough, I’m currently reading Hitler: A Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock. Thus far in the book, Hitler is slowly gaining power through an uncanny political prowess, understanding of prevailing mood of the populace i.e. anger and powerlessness as a consequence of the Treaty of Versaille, and really a grotesqely comic tendancy to be underestimated.
I’m not seeing (at least not yet) where ol’ adolph would recognize an up-side to disarming the general population-he needs them while he’s coming up, and later his police state is so highly organized and brutal, that disarmament would be unnecessary. Also, comprehensive gun control would likely undermine Hitler’s near constant rhetoric that everything he was doing was merely Nationalism, represented and embodied in naziism.
As far as the Jewish and other persecuted peoples being allowed arms-the point can be ceded by the very fact that they were eventually forced to relinquish EVERYTHING OF VALUE TO THEM, only starting with their posessions.
The thing is, the Nazis didn’t let Jews do a lot of things. I think the fact that the German government didn’t let Jews own guns doesn’t say the Nazis loved gun control; just that the Nazis didn’t like Jews, because owning guns was just one of a list of things that Jews weren’t allowed to do (like be citizens, go to school, marry or have sex with non-Jews, own businesses, own really anything, live.)
Ultimately, the Nazis didn’t care that much if the average German citizen owned a gun. Why would they? If anything, it was the opposite. The Hitler Youth, for example, offered rifle training. It makes sense. If you’re planning on conscripting young men when they get old enough, it’s a leg up if they’re familiar with gun use and safety before they join the army.
This. It’s not as if the Germans had any great difficulty quashing armed Jewish uprising when it did occur. As Alessan would no doubt attest the state of Israel wasn’t created as a result of the personal ownership of firearms by the Jewish citizenry.
Well, not having enough rifles to arm all your soldiers doesn’t help.
Hitler had no nominal authority over occupied France, the Pétain government was independent and autonomous. Of course, it bent over backwards to please the Nazis, but that’s a different issue.
Besides, Pétain had no need to ban (most) private gun ownership in occupied France, considering weapons had already been heavily restricted back in '39 to avoid a Russian Revolution style thing should the war drag on. These restrictions were even further strengthened on May 10, 1940 (the day the Germans kicked the door in) ; so quite a bit before the country fell in late June.
Which, by definition, has nothing to do with private ownership of firearms.
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I said occupied France, not Vichy France. Though Vichy France might have been considered occupied in a sense, they pretended it wasn’t - for a while.
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Unless you think more private ownership of guns would have kept the Nazis from winning, I don’t understand what the state of gun laws before the invasion has to do with anything.
Never driven I80 in Wyoming I take it.
People do land small planes on interstates - I remember a couple of examples around here. I’m not sure I’d want to try it with a bomber, though.
I was making a joke involving the way many Israelis like to remember their War for Independence in 1948, not attempting to make a serious point.
It worked for B.J. Blazkowicz.
Not to pick on Simplicio, because I’m not going to go google it either, but surely, this is a factual question with factual answers? What were the gun laws in Germany (and France, Poland, etc) when Hitler came to power and what changes did Hitler and his party make to those laws?
If there’s a debate to be had here, you have to start with the facts.
That’s a red herring. It does not matter that the Nazis did not love gun control for gun control’s sake, because they loved gun control as a weapon. That is what you should be taking away from this: that forbidding people the right to defend themselves, the right of their children to be educated, the right to associate freely with others, are all weapons that can and have been used to oppress innocent people.
See, I think the gun control angle is a red herring. There’s a vast chasm between a democratically elected government saying “OK, no private citizens are allowed to own guns,” and a fascist government saying “This ethnic group isn’t allowed to do a bunch of things.” The horror of the German laws isn’t that they banned gun ownership, it’s that the specifically targeted the Jews.
I also think it’s relevant to view the gun restrictions in context of both their actual impact (how many guns were confiscated, did it make a lick of difference) and the scope of all the restrictions on Jews (did the German government single out gun ownership as something especially worrying, or did they just start writing laws left and right to restrict all kinds of freedoms).
A red herring? You honestly consider it a red herring that the Nazis passed laws forbidding Jews from working in most occupations, marrying non-Jews, declared any existing marriages null and void, made Jews non-citizens, required Jews to wear yellow stars, expelled Jewish children from school, forbade Jews from owning telephones or radios, or cats, or dogs, or birds, forbade Jews from using public telephones, required Jews to add Sarah or Israel as their middle names if their first name wasn’t “Jewish” enough, forbade Jews from owning businesses and confiscated those owned by Jews, established curfews for Jews, banned Jews from public parks, restaurants, swimming pools and benches, confiscated property, required Jews to live in designated ghettos and eventually shipped them off to concentration and later death camps to be a red herring? What’s important and the only relevant thing to be taken from all of this is that the Nazis used gun control? Which, by the way, forbade Jews from owning guns but
Note the bolded bit, members of the NSDAP (the Nazi party) were now exempted from gun ownership restrictions in the 1938 law; the law actually expanded gun ownership rights from the 1928 law, not restricted it. Unless of course you happened to be a Jew, but then you had already been made a non-citizen by that point.
No.
Learn to read.
Of course the question about the gun laws is a factual one (as long as you don’t insist on trying to map that onto present US gun politics.) Unfortunately the range of freely available translations of historical German legislation leaves a lot to be desired. It is all available in German, but that’s probably not very useful here. However I don’t think the general facts are really in dispute at this point. If anyone has specific questions I might be able to answer them, but “What was the law and how did it change?” is a little broad.
Funny, you just called this:
A red herring. Now you’re saying you didn’t. Which is it?
Again, funny. Take your own advice and learn to read. The Nazis didn’t expand gun control. They eased gun control; if you were a member of the NSDAP you were no longer subject to gun ownership restrictions.
Well, obviously. That was my point. Germany during the Nazi period stripped Jews of all their rights. Singling out the gun restrictions is silly, it seems to me. They took away the right of Jews to do anything.