https://medium.com/@AviWoolf/gun-contro ... a90833a35eFew might know this, but until the 20th century, the right — nay, the duty — to bear arms was just as sacred a right in Europe as it was in the United States. France considered it one of the rights won by the Revolution, where free citizens cannot be denied their right of self-defense by the evil nobility or the government. In Great Britain, purchase of arms was extremely easy — again, based on the Common Law idea of a free citizen’s rights.
Nor was this an exclusively “right-wing” idea. Yes, classical liberals were big on it, but traditional aristocratic conservatives were certainly not enthusiastic on the idea of giving the “lower sort” so much firepower. To the contrary, it was left-wing movements, both socialist and anarchist, who saw the people bearing arms in a militia as an important guarantee against tyranny. So thoroughly ingrained was this idea among socialists, that many even in the Bolshevik movement preferred such a militia over a standing army which might bring back “Bonapartism” (i.e., a military coup).
As for gun control being a tyrannical weapon — yes, until very recently, governments or people in charge explicitly disarmed the people in order to keep them compliant. This is true regardless of whether they were knights and lords keeping down the peasantry, democracies fearing “troublesome” minorities (often on a racist basis), or autocracies in Russia and Turkey (or modern dictatorships to this day).
That the governments in question would likely win most fights against rebellions is beside the point — wars are bloody, messy and costly and worth avoiding if possible. The belief that an armed people can deter or at least be a focal point of resistance to tyranny is a belief shared by those same tyrants....
But again, that’s missing the key point, once a mainstay of the left: a people about to be crushed have the right to resist — to exact a cost in blood, even if they ultimately lose. The point of the armed populace was not that every revolt would be successful — even the most rabid pro-gun people in the US would acknowledge that — but that it would cost. Yes, all the ghetto and camp revolts were crushed, but some of the mechanism was slowed, and at least some SS people got a dirt nap instead of living out their lives in peace in the Eastern Bloc or in the west after ludicrously short sentences (or when they belonged in a home, not a jail). A few thousand here, a few thousand there did manage to escape and live beyond the war.
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Which brings us back to today. As we’ve established, armed revolt would not have prevented the Holocaust. But the threats against which citizens arm themselves today — criminals, drug cartels, terrorist organizations, mass shooters — are not the Wehrmacht. They are not a millions-strong armed force with devastating weapons of war. They possess neither the training, nor equipment, nor the territory to be thus. Most gun attacks involve at most a few individuals. Against this, even a pistol-armed citizen with some training can be useful — after all, a Waffen SS unit will not be coming in after a successful thwarting. So the comparison has little value for either side.