The American Dystopia Where We Will All Have To Own Guns

 

I was rather shocked when I first heard this report. Did I hear it correctly?

Josh Deaser of "Just Guns" - you know, near Denny's, on that seedy, semi-lawless stretch of Auburn Blvd. near Watt - said, with respect to the CT massacre:

"If somebody were to have a gun there, a concealed weapon, properly trained, know how to use it, the situation would not have gotten as far as it did."

Huh. Really!

Deaser says nothing, of course, about the mental stability of the concealed weapon carrier(s). We are heading to a dystopian future that only a gun shop owner could love, where everyone is required to be armed.

It strikes me the Nazis were more sensible about these things. Nazis wanted to euthanize the mentally ill, not train and arm as many as possible (and thus better-equipped to euthanize us all).

Of course, some in this country are fond of saying that when the Nazis took power, they disarmed the people, in order to keep them weak and helpless. That's false, however. The Nazis disarmed the Jews, but were happy to relax the rules for most everyone else. Triumphant Aryans had to be armed Aryans:

The 1938 German Weapons Act, the precursor of the current weapons law, superseded the 1928 law. As under the 1928 law, citizens were required to have a permit to carry a firearm and a separate permit to acquire a firearm. Furthermore, the law restricted ownership of firearms to "...persons whose trustworthiness is not in question and who can show a need for a (gun) permit." Under the new law:

• Gun restriction laws applied only to handguns, not to long guns or ammunition. Writes Prof. Bernard Harcourt of the University of Chicago, "The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition."

• The groups of people who were exempt from the acquisition permit requirement expanded. Holders of annual hunting permits, government workers, and NSDAP party members were no longer subject to gun ownership restrictions. Prior to the 1938 law, only officials of the central government, the states, and employees of the German Reichsbahn Railways were exempted.

• The age at which persons could own guns was lowered from 20 to 18.

• The firearms carry permit was valid for three years instead of one year.

• Jews were forbidden from the manufacturing or ownership of firearms and ammunition. 

I like Billmon's take:

I think the gun nuts are in somewhat the same bind now: Their movement rests on an absolute, or near-absolute reading of the Second Amendment as an individual right to bear firearms.
What that means—practically as well as theoretically—is that events like the Sandy Hook massacre can’t be stopped, or even slowed, by the tools presently available to law enforcement. ....
And so a logical deux ex machina: The solution to gun violence is to arm everybody! No need for tampering with the Second Amendment, or waiting around for tiny corpses to cool so that we can begin talking about whether we should be talking about eventually having a national conversation about guns.
All we need to do is make sure any would-be assassins die instantly in a hail of bullets from surrounding onlookers the moment they draw—without, of course, harming any innocent bystanders in the process. Piece of cake.
...But we can at least hope that the gun nuts are heading down the same road as the anti-abortion nuts: Finally alienating a generally, but not passionately, sympathetic public with their progressively more extreme positions.