Am I on your ignore list or something? I’ve posted to this thread real examples of Jews who lived through the war. That certainly makes a difference to them.
Let’s take one of them: Yitzhak Zuckerman.
No gun = certain death.
With gun = fought his way out of the ghetto and lived through the war.
It certainly made a difference for him.
Why would the metric of success be complete overthrow of the Nazis and Hitler becoming a nice guy? That seems to be where some of you would put the bar, which is not realistic.
Zuckerman states it well himself…
He said that in 1968. You know where he would be in 1968 if he didn’t have a gun? His ash would have fertilized the fields surrounding the Treblinka extermination camp back in the early 1940’s.
That’s a bit of a difference.
Let’s stick with the one WWII case study we already can’t agree on, shall we?
Sure, but the point is that armed citizens aren’t automatically useless against tyranny, though neither are they automatically effective.
Sure, but this is inevitable when there’s no legitimate, democratic process for the transfer of power. Only force will be able to effect a change. If the citizens want such a process, it can certainly be implemented in the aftermath of a revolution.
I’ve hardly ever seen a more offensive set of posts than these. No, things would not have been better if all Jews were NRA members. Your ignorance of history is truly astounding.
First, the Holocaust did not begin until after the war started - so your claim that Germans shooting Jews would have encourage more to escape is nonsense. It is not like the signs weren’t there already without shooting - but it isn’t so easy to pull up stakes and move, and it is not like the US was particularly welcoming.
Second, John Wayne wasn’t Jewish. If you think that a few guns in the house would have held off a heavily armed Gestapo patrol for long, you are crazy. I’m sure that the Gestapo, those great defenders of rights, would have been happy to shoot everyone in the house right there. And those in other houses, just to be safe. There were few enough survivors, you apparently wish there were fewer.
Third, to give you a small geography lesson, Warsaw is not in Germany. The pre-War Polish government was anti-Semitic enough, but not so much as to require firepower. Plus, many Jews got moved into the Ghetto. I’m sure carrying a gun while being relocated would have worked out just fine.
Not that it would have helped. Unless they managed to smuggle in massive numbers of anti-aircraft weapons, I don’t think the Luftwaffe would have had a hard time ending the uprising.
In my opinion blaming us for not fighting back enough is just one step above Holocaust Denial. You sure you want to go there?
Anyhow, this illustrates my answer to the OP. Rabid conservatives (not the WFB type) seem to live in a land of fantasy and stereotypes, where they could see themselves killing an intruder or school shooter so they need a gun to make this fantasy come true some day. As for the military, Red Dawn is their film of choice. Some guys with guns can take out an invading army. Go USA! Go NRA!
Guns in the home are good protection. That your protective guns might be used by your disturbed son to blow your head off does not enter into the picture. The statistics on the likelihood that your gun will kill an innocent rather than an intruder doesn’t either. I suppose it is not surprising, giving this fantasy prone personality, that so many conservatives are so religious. They can see the ark in their minds, never mind, that boring science.
I’m a big liberal, but (perhaps colored by the fact that I lost family that I will never get a chance to meet in the Holocaust) if I could go back in time and personally give every single Jew in the Pale of Europe a gun in 1935, I’d do it in a second.
But I don’t think this has anything to do with modern politics, though- and I think bringing up the Holocaust in a gun control debate is pure Godwin, and immediately kills the argument of the one making it. Yes, if every Jew had a gun in the 30s and 40s it’s possible more of them would have survived the Holocaust. No, this has no bearing on the current discussion of gun safety in America.
If you were living in a ghetto in an occupied country, then I totally respect your right to have a gun, and agree totally it makes sense.
Guess what. We aren’t. My friend’s father and mother were survivors. They met in a camp. I bet if he had tried to face down the Gestapo at home with a gun, he would not have. And he lived in Poland, not Germany also.
That’s why I didn’t say the SS would be coming. If people they were arresting had guns, you can bet that there would have been heavily armed Gestapo patrols.
Of course Debaser seems to think that the Gestapo, faced with a hand gun, would have turned around and said, “I guess that Jew can stay.” :rolleyes: (at him, not you.)
While that might be true (i.e. that overthrowing a tyrannical government doesn’t guarantee that what replaces it might become tyrannical itself), it’s irrelevant to the question of whether an armed citizenry CAN overthrow a tyrannical government.
If they can strawman the argument then they can just handwave it away and dismiss it. And if they can associate you with the strawman position then they can do the same with all of your arguments, instead of having to bother with logical refutations.
If “things would not have been better” for Jews to be armed let me ask you a simple question:
If you could go back in time and take away Yitzhak Zuckerman’s gun would you have?
If not, doesn’t that make your claim that “things would not have been better” if not for guns in the hands of Jews wrong?
No kidding.
:rolleyes:
The example I posted from the Warsaw Ghetto is a simple one. It very cleanly and obviously destroys the argument that I was responding to that guns weren’t effective to have and use against the Nazis. Sure, they didn’t save every person and turn Hitler into a nice guy, which is absurdly what many of you seem to think the bar of success should be. But for the few that had them and used them and lived through the war to talk about it they certainly did “make a difference” which was my claim.
It’s just frustrating. It’s just so dishonest. They outnumber me ten to one and yet these sort of tactics are always used. I don’t know why I expect better, but I do.
I hardly claimed that they were going to be turned into nice people. You seem to be claiming that German Jews would have done better with guns. Care to back it up?
BTW, the examples of Nazis becoming even worse include towns they destroyed in Eastern Europe (not Jewish ones) because someone in the town shot a Nazi official.
Nice bit of sleight of hand there. No one is objecting to the use of guns when you are in a state of war - whether a partisan in the woods, a member of the military, or someone in the Warsaw Ghetto. But the application to the gun debate in the US today is that the right - and you originally - claim that private gun ownership by Jews - in Germany - would have somehow saved lives or staved off the Holocaust or something.
When the North Koreans invade, even the greatest advocate of gun control will be there handing out weapons. (And Poland was invaded.) Why don’t you get back to an argument having relevance for our situation, and not this little band of rebels crap.
Multiple people have set the bar that only stopping the entire holocaust or having the Germans decide to not mistreat the Jews should be the metric. If you don’t remember this re-read the thread.
Why add the word “German” to the argument. (Other than to try and discredit my Warsaw Ghetto example?)
The initial claim was that guns wouldn’t have “done any good” in the hands of Jews against the Germans. I posted an example that shatters this: The resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto.
That’s it. You don’t get to now move the goalposts, that it must be in Germany, or must be someone in their “home”. (The Warsaw Ghetto was were people were shipped into, but it was still their home.) But for some reason you want to find all sorts of reasons why this shouldn’t count, when in fact there are none.
This is beyond silly. Guns do you no good if you are a Jew in your house in Germany, but you admit they would do you good if you are a “partisan in the woods” in a state of war.
Where do those “partisans in the woods” come from? Do they grow like fungus on the trees? They come from their houses, with their guns, if they have them.
I’ve seen ridiculous nitpicking on the board before but this might be an all time best.
That, I think, is the real difference: not “there are more crazy people on the Right” or “crazy people are crazier on the Right” but “the Right takes its crazy people more seriously.”
Or, alternatively, the Left is better than the Right at portraying the opposition’s crazy people as mainstream. I suspect it’s a lot of the former but with a not insignificant amount of the latter.
If you start with the premise that “business owners” are the only people whose interests should be directly addressed by the government (and the related view that the U.S. is first and foremost a nation of businesses) it’s easy to reach the conclusion that the President needs business experience.