The reason that the gun laws are more restrictive in those parts of the country is because they've realised[sic] what a huge problem they represent.
Then why is it that the areas with the least restrictive gun laws in the U.S. have the fewest gun crimes? Guns aren't the problem - it's culture in urban areas that embraces thuggish behavior and a "war on drugs" that create incentives for gang turf wars and related violence that are the problem. You don't have a similar "war on drugs" in Europe. It's a real problem here both for gun violence and for creating a huge prison population. Mexico has very strict gun laws but has incredible levels of violence as well. Why? Same god-damn drug war, that's why. It creates incredible monetary incentives because of the black market drug trade which in turn creates the wars between among the cartels and gangs to control that lucrative trade and since it's already a criminal enterprise it attracts those sociopaths who could care less about others.
If you eliminated the drug related deaths from our "body count" we'd have an extremely low rate of murder and gun related deaths. Basically, you're advocating eliminating the rights of the law abiding because of the acts of those who are not law abiding. Research has shown that those who have a licensed to carry a concealed firearm are even more law abiding than law enforcement. So, again, it's not guns that are the problem but the criminals who use them.
The point was NOT that Hitler disarmed the German people, but that they were disarmed. The Weimar Republic enacted draconian gun laws because the Treaty of Versailles required them to disarm their military and they did not want to have their people armed and their military disarmed so they passed laws confiscating firearms before their military had to be disarmed. The Nazis simply made good use of those laws and strengthened them as against groups that they wanted to murder.
Shortly after the Nazis took power, they began house-to-house searches to discover firearms in the homes of suspected opponents. They claimed to find large numbers of weapons in the hands of subversives. Bernard E. Harcourt, writing for the University of Chicago Law School and Political Science Department, notes: "the Nazi gun laws of 1938 specifically banned Jewish persons from obtaining a license to manufacture firearms or ammunition. Third, approximately eight months after enacting the 1938 Nazi gun laws, Hitler imposed regulations prohibiting Jewish persons from possessing any dangerous weapons, including firearms." Here's a copy of the 1938 law, in English, if you're interested in reviewing it: http://jpfo.org/filegen-n-z/NaziLawEnglish.htm (from the group "Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership"). Israel Gutmann, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and world renowned scholar of the Holocaust outlined how the Warsaw Ghetto uprising against the Nazis was hampered by the fact that imprisoned Jews did not have access to adequate arsenals of firearms, although their resistance did lead Goebbels to note in his diary: “This just shows what you can expect from Jews if they lay hands on weapons.”
The same argument goes for Stalin's Russia. The people were not disarmed. You are simply incorrect.
Really? Regarding the Communists and Stalin, in October 1918, the Council of People’s Commissars (the Communist government) ordered citizens to surrender all firearms, ammunition, and sabres, having first mandated registration of all weapons six months earlier. Just like the Nazis, Communist Party members were exempt from the ban.
A 1920 decree then imposed a minimum six month prison sentence for any non-Communist possessing a weapon. After the civil war, possession became punishable with three months hard labor plus fines. After Stalin came to power, he made possession of unlawful firearms a crime punishable by death. Stalin didn't originate the gun control laws, but his Communist predecessors did and he furthered them and it enabled him to oppress his political opponents and murder tens of millions.
I also notice that you start talking about 'accidental' gun deaths for children. I didn't mention 'accidental' deaths I just stated the plain truth that thousands of children are being injured or killed by guns in your country every year. I suppose if they are not accidents you don't care?
It's not that I don't care, it's just that gun control advocates use the generic term 'children' to evoke images of 5-10 year old kids dying in the streets when the truth of the matter is that very few young children die as a result of gun violence and that most of the victims of gun violence are young adults aged 16-19 who are themselves criminals but are called "children" by gun control advocates to confuse the matter and gain sympathy for their cause. Approximately 90% of all victims of gun violence in the U.S. are themselves criminals and most of it occurs as a result of their criminal activities. Let's face it, people won't be as sympathetic to the cause if they know that most of the victims were criminals and weren't really young children but young thugs who are dealing drugs or active gang members. Your tactic is bullshit sophistry and you know it.
Certainly you appear to be pretty uninformed.
As I've demonstrated, it's your ignorance that sticks out here.
The majority of Germans never saw themselves as being oppressed, you do not know what you are talking about.
The German people as a whole may not have felt oppressed but the Jews, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, Gypsies, Catholics, Jehovah Witnesses, gays, and every other group the Nazis targeted sure as hell did and the Nazis made damned sure they weren't armed. The same thing happened in the USA after the civil war - Southerners didn't like blacks protecting themselves when they came to lynch them so oppressive laws aimed at eliminating firearms from blacks were enacted. In our country firearm laws originated from racism. The powerful always want to disarm the powerless.
Bringing Cambodia into your argument is pretty desperate but again the population of Cambodia had no history of being armed.
Cambodian gun control was a legacy of French colonialism. A series of Royal Ordinances, decreed by a monarchy subservient to the French, appears to have been enacted out of fear of the Communist and anti-colonial insurgencies that were taking place in the 1920s and 1930s throughout Southeast Asia, although not in Cambodia. The first law, in 1920, dealt with the carrying of guns, while the last law in the series, in 1938, imposed a strict licensing system. Only hunters could have guns, and they were allowed to own only a single firearm. These colonial laws appear to have stayed in place after Cambodia was granted independence. The Khmer Rouge enacted no new gun control laws, for they enacted no laws at all other than a Constitution.
As soon as the Khmer Rouge took power, they immediately set out to disarm the populace. One Cambodian recalls that
Eang [a woman] watched soldiers stride onto the porches of the houses and knock on the doors and ask the people who answered if they had any weapons. "We are here now to protect you," the soldiers said, "and no one has a need for a weapon any more." People who said that they kept no weapons were forced to stand aside and allow the soldiers to look for themselves. . . . The round-up of weapons took nine or ten days, and once the soldiers had concluded the villagers were no longer armed, they dropped their pretense of friendliness. . . . The soldiers said everyone would have to leave the village for a while, so that the troops could search for weapons; when the search was finished, they could return.
People being forced out of villages and cities were searched thoroughly, and weapons and foreign currency were confiscated. To the limited extent that Cambodians owned guns through the government licensing system, the names of registered gun owners were of course available to the new government.
You are blind to the harm guns cause in your country because you like guns.
I am not blind to gun violence, if that's your implication, I just attribute the it to it's proper cause - a failed drug war and gangs. Guns themselves are not the problem as evidenced by the hundreds of millions of guns not used in the U.S. for anything improper and by the fact that the places with the least restrictive gun laws have the least gun violence.
The argument that you need them to keep the government at bay is unbelievably weak and does not justify those dead or maimed children that you ignore, or the large number of suicides that wouldn't happen if guns did not make it so easy.
You're saying that bearing arms to prevent tyranny is a weak reason, but your opinion does not make it so (like anal sphincters, everyone has an opinion). As I stated, I do not ignore the deaths of criminals but I acknowledge that it is their criminal activity that is to blame - not the gun. Their criminal activity does not justify depriving the law abiding of their right to protect themselves and their country.
As for suicides, I believe that people have the right to end their own existence -- my desire is that no one would but would rather see them seek help and speak to others about their problems and find support but the reason they don't is because there are a lot of shitty people in this world and not enough to lean on. Suicides in this country are not out of line with other countries and in Japan where firearm ownership is rare, suicides are far higher.
Iraq had plenty of guns and your government and mine had little trouble taking over. The idea that people with pistols or rifles are going to make any difference to the US military is laughable.
We didn't have to engage the Iraqi people - they welcomed us at first. However, when Islamist forces tried to create havoc it certainly did create issues and we didn't have much success against that until we tried to win over the local population because the military realized that they couldn't succeed without the support of the locals. We have over 300 million firearms in our country - I think even our military would be hard pressed to successfully suppress our civilian population and it would be further complicated for them because they are our neighbors, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers and it would be difficult for the military to get the troops to sustain a campaign against their own people and it would be easier for citizen rebels to infiltrate the military itself and cause harm from within. Your shallow analysis and ignorance is what's laughable.
By the way boats have plenty of good uses. Tell me what use a .55 Magnum has.
There's no such thing as a civilian .55 Magnum. There's the .44 and the .45 and a .50, but no .55 unless you're talking about the BOYS anti-tank rifle. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_anti-tank_rifle), which is not civilian. In the case of the handguns, they are useful for defending one's life and the lives of your loved ones. The Department of Justice under the Clinton Administration determined that guns were used to defend against crimes approximately 1.5 million times per year and some estimates range as high as 2.5 million times per year. The anti-tank rifle was very useful to the British in WW II until it was phased out for something better because it was ineffective against heavier armored tanks.
Thanks for the dialogue and I'd be glad to discuss it some more once you've actually researched a little bit and become more informed. Don't just read the DailyKos or the Brady Campaign, but look up sites that advocate for the Second Amendment, like GunCite.com.