Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns (16 page)

Let’s put the hypotheticals aside for now and instead go through the actual history to see how gun control and confiscation really worked. Once you have the facts and understand the time line it’ll be a lot easier to see how important gun control was for the Nazis.

Before Hitler rose to power, it was the Weimar Republic’s gun laws of 1928 and 1931 that ruled the land. They provided that “
licenses to obtain or to carry firearms shall only be issued to persons whose reliability is not in doubt, and only after proving a need for them.” It also prohibited gun possession for anyone “who has acted in an inimical manner toward the state, or it is to be feared that he will endanger the public security.”

A 1931 Weimar “
emergency decree”
authorized the German states to register all firearms, which could be confiscated if “public security and order so requires.” The interior minister warned the states to provide “the secure storage of the lists of persons who have registered their weapons,” so that they would not “
fall into the hands of radical elements.” Unfortunately, they never considered that those radical elements might be the government itself and those lists would eventually fall right into the hands of the Nazis.

According to Stephen P. Halbrook, a constitutional attorney who has done extensive research on German firearm laws, “the Nazi seizure of power in 1933
was consolidated by massive searches and seizures of firearms from political opponents, who were invariably described as ‘communists.’ ”

After Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the Nazis used gun control to repress Jews and political opponents. Using the Reichstag (the German parliament building) fire as evidence of an impending plot to overthrow the government, Hitler successfully pushed through the ironically titled “
Decree of the Reich President
for the Protection of People and State” emergency measure. This decree suspended civil liberties, thereby allowing the state to restrict basic rights, like freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly. Guarantees of personal privacy were also suspended as
Nazi police began to search homes and offices for subversive literature and firearms under the guise of suppressing “Communists.”

During the early months of 1933, storm troopers raided the apartment of the widow of Friedrich Ebert, the first president of the Weimar Republic. According to the
New York Times,
they
searched “for hidden arms, but found only a revolver belonging to Herr Ebert [Jr.], which he handed to them together with a permit that had expired.”

A few days later, perhaps to send a message that no one was immune, they searched the home of another notable person: Albert Einstein. The
Times
reported: “Charging that Professor Albert Einstein had a huge quantity of arms and ammunition stored in his secluded home in Caputh, the National Socialists sent Brown Shirt men and policemen to search it today,
but the nearest thing to arms they found was a bread knife.”

That might be embarrassing to some governments, but it did not slow the Nazis down. The following month, Nazi police conducted several mass searches throughout Germany. The
Times
reported:

A large force of police assisted by
Nazi auxiliaries raided a Jewish quarter in Eastern Berlin, searching everywhere for weapons and papers. Streets were closed and pedestrians were halted. Worshipers leaving synagogues were searched and those not carrying double identification cards were arrested. Even flower boxes were overturned in the search through houses and some printed matter and a few weapons were seized.

One week later, the
Times
reported that Nazi police had searched passengers’ baggage at railway stations: “Truckloads of trunks filled with
Communist literature, arms and munitions were seized in Berlin and other cities.”

As the home inspections and mass searches continued, Nazi authorities turned their attention to the licensing and registration records they had on gun owners thanks to the original Weimar law. In April 1933, the
Times
reported the following from Breslau:

The Police President of the city has decreed that “all persons now or formerly of the Jewish faith who hold permits to carry arms or shooting licenses must surrender them forthwith to the police authorities.”

The order is justified officially on the grounds that Jewish citizens have allegedly used their weapons for unlawful attacks on members of the Nazi organization and the police.

Inasmuch as the Jewish population “cannot be regarded as trustworthy,” it is stated,
permits to carry arms will not in the future be issued to any member thereof.

This confiscation was permissible based on the Weimar firearms law, still in effect, which authorized the disarming of persons deemed dangerous to public safety. Police had discretion to cancel firearm permits at will.

The next five years (1933–38) saw National Socialism imposed on all aspects of society, including a planned economy, work camps for dissidents, racial purity laws, the elimination of Jews from professions, and the forcing into line of labor, sports, and culture through both propaganda and coercion.

In 1938, Hitler revised the Weimar law to exclude Jews from firearms businesses, ban .22-caliber hollow-point bullets, and stipulate that anyone could be disarmed on “public security”
grounds. At the same time, some provisions for “loyal” Germans were softened. For example, an acquisition license was no longer required for long guns, so long
as the state determined that you were not a threat.

In November 1938, using the homicide of an official at the German embassy in Paris by a Jewish teenager from Poland as the impetus, and
relying on those helpful Weimar firearm registration lists, the Nazis disarmed Jews all over Germany during what’s now called Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass.” Jewish homes and
shops were ransacked and synagogues were burned. Thousands of Jewish men were thrown into concentration camps.

On November 9, 1938, under the headline
BERLIN POLICE HEAD ANNOUNCES “DISARMING” OF JEWS
, the
Times
reported:

The Berlin Police President, Count Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, announced that as a result of a police activity in the last few weeks the entire Jewish population of Berlin had been “disarmed” with the confiscation of 2,569 hand weapons, 1,702 firearms and 20,000 rounds of ammunition. Any Jews still found in possession of weapons without valid licenses
are threatened with the severest punishment.

It’s interesting to note that the Jews were already being disarmed weeks before the German embassy killing in Paris (the incident that supposedly necessitated the confiscation). That means the raids had been planned well in advance. I guess the saying “Never let a serious crisis go to waste” wasn’t invented yesterday.

A couple of days later, on November 11, 1938, the
New York Times
published an article headlined
POSSESSION OF WEAPONS BARRED
, which reported on the confiscation of weapons from the Jews:

One of the first legal measures issued was an order by Heinrich Himmler, commander of all German police, forbidding Jews to possess any weapons whatever and imposing a
penalty of twenty years confinement in a concentration camp upon every Jew found in possession of a weapon hereafter.

It’s pretty incredible that those who talk about guns and Nazis usually treat the disarmament of the Jews as though it’s a minor point. The
Daily Kos
article quoted above puts this fact in parentheses, saying “Hitler in fact relaxed gun control laws (though not for the Jews and other groups)” as though it’s almost an afterthought. Stephen King references it only so that he can make an idiotic point that, since it was the government that did the killing, the fact that the Jews lost their guns made no difference.

Disarming the people most likely to stand up to you (and using registration lists to do it) is not an afterthought at all—it’s the whole point! Could the German Jews single-handedly have defeated the Nazis? No—absolutely not. But could they have mounted a much stronger resistance, or put up enough of a fight to encourage their countrymen or other nations to join them? We’ll never know.

Finally, there’s a legitimate question to be asked about whether loyal, Christian Germans were really allowed to purchase and keep firearms—even if they followed the restrictive rules. In 1940, the
New York Times
published an article that related the conditions in France after the Nazi occupation to the way the German people had lived for years:

The best way to sum up the disciplinary laws imposed upon France by the German conqueror is to say that the Nazi decrees reduce the French people to as low a condition as that occupied by the German people. Military orders now forbid the
French to do things which the German people have not been allowed to do since Hitler came to power. To own radio senders or to listen to foreign broadcasts, to organize public meetings and distribute pamphlets, to disseminate anti-German news in any form,
to retain possession of firearms—all these things are prohibited for the subjugated people of France, as they have been verboten these half dozen years to the people of Germany.
(emphasis added)

The facts are clear to anyone willing to see them: Hitler used existing gun control laws to consolidate power and then he confiscated firearms from Jews and other opponents to ensure he would keep it. It was a key part of his ability to extinguish any flicker of hope by the opposition and it’s why, in the midst of World War II, he was quoted during his “Table Talk” monologues as saying:

The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.

I’m pretty sure I’ve ever said this before, but, in this case, Hitler was right. Those who would prefer to rewrite history so that it better fits their current political agenda would be smart to read his actual words and open their eyes to what really happened. The reason that history so often repeats is not only human nature, but also human ignorance.

A
dam Smith’s most famous book is
The Wealth of Nations,
but his more important work came seven years earlier, when he wrote
The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
While most people have never heard of that book, it was the key to everything. Smith realized that the free market could never work unless people first understood morality and human nature. When a breakdown in the free market occurs, it’s not the market’s fault; it’s the fault of individual participants who’ve lost their way.

The same principle holds true for guns. The Second Amendment, like all of our rights, is reliant on a moral and virtuous people. Without that, nothing else matters. Man cannot rule himself if, as Smith put it, moral sentiment is missing.

That, I contend, is the answer. Not just to gun violence, but to many of the other problems that plague us. We must stop looking to assign blame to the choices we are offered—whether it’s guns or large sodas or tanning beds—and instead take personal responsibility for our choice and our lives. It’s clear to me that if we raise children with no moral compass, we are planting the seeds of our own destruction. As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “[O]nly a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.”

But the good news is that the opposite also holds true: if we
can restore morality and responsibility and virtue back to their rightful places, we are planting the seeds of a future filled with hope and opportunity.

It is my hope that now, after showing that guns are not the problem, this section will prove what really is.

*   *   *

To claim that America’s “culture of violence” is responsible for school shootings is tantamount to cigarette company executives declaring that environmental pollution is the chief cause of lung cancer.

—
STEPHEN KING
,
Guns

A
t 7:45 a.m. on a frosty Monday in December 1997, a bespectacled fourteen-year-old boy walked into his Kentucky high school and made his way toward the lobby outside the principal’s office. There, an informal group of thirty-five to forty kids stood in a large circle saying their morning prayers. The boy, a freshman who played baritone saxophone in the high school band, waited for the final “Amen”
before taking a stolen handgun out of his backpack and opening fire.

By most accounts, the boy fired eight to ten shots into the group. By the time he put his weapon down three of his classmates were dead and five more had been wounded. Before the police arrived, the boy spoke to his principal and seemingly could not believe what he’d just done. “It was kind of like I was in a dream,” he said. “
And then I woke up.”

As the reality began to settle in, the boy looked up at his friend who had come to stand by his side and said, “
Kill me, please.”