It’s been almost two weeks since the audio of National Rifle Association lobbyist Brian Judy went viral, drawing broad condemnation of his comments equating universal background checks to Nazi Germany, and calling Jews “stupid” for supporting Initiative 594. “These people,” exclaims Judy, “you come to this country and you support gun control? … Hello! Is anybody home here?”
So far, neither Judy nor the NRA have had the balls to give an official response. But on her Facebook page, Judy’s co-speaker at the July 23 event, NRA campaign field representative Adina Hicks, has come to his defense, lauding Judy for “speaking the truth and giving a history lesson.”
Hicks herself has a prior history of buying into the NRA’s bullshit “background checks equals Hitler” meme. Introducing herself in a forum on WaGuns.org, Hicks wrote: “When I found out about [I-594] and read the initiative, my first thought was Nazi Germany, Hitler’s gun registration and eventual confiscation.” Because, of course, having to fill out a form to purchase a gun is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust.
But then, that’s the sort of sharp legal reading of I-594 that you’d expect from a disbarred attorney. Adina Hicks is actually registered to vote as Adina Atwood, who was disbarred in 2004 for “multiple acts of misconduct” including abandoning clients and failing to return their fees. Not sure what the circumstances are surrounding her name change, but it seems to be recent, as both names appear on NRA websites, but with the same phone number.
Whatever.
The point the “I-594 equals Hitler” crowd is making is that the Nazis used gun registration records to disarm the Jews, leaving them unable to defend themselves from the state. Which is both a perversion of history, and downright offensive.
First of all, it was the Weimar government that instituted tight gun registration laws after World War I, not the Nazis; Hitler actually loosened gun control laws for everybody but the Jews. The eventual confiscation of the few guns held by German Jews wasn’t an act of gun control as much as it was an act of anti-Semitism. Big difference. And to characterize it as anything but anti-Semitism is insulting.
Second, the very suggestion that disarming the Jews was a significant event on the timeline to the Holocaust is blame-the-victim historical revisionism of the worst kind. Forty-two million well-armed Frenchmen just rolled over in the face of the German blitzkrieg, as did 35 million Poles and much of the rest of Europe. The very idea that Germany’s 500,000 Jews—about 0.75 percent of the population—armed with handguns and hunting rifles, could have defended themselves against the Nazi regime is downright crazy!
Besides, German Jews represented only a fraction of the estimated 6 million European Jews the Nazis exterminated. So to argue that Nazi gun control laws led to the Holocaust is tantamount to arguing that all the horrors of World War II could have been avoided if only German Jewry had the guns and the balls to defend themselves. It is an argument that if taken to its logical conclusion essentially blames World War II on the Jews!
And finally, whatever their logic or their twisted view of history, what the likes of Hicks and Judy refuse to acknowledge is that the “I-594 is Hitler” equation is transitive. I-594 merely requires filling out some paperwork before purchasing a gun. So if I-594 equals the Holocaust, then the Holocaust must equal paperwork. Thus to rhetorically equate I-594 with the Holocaust is to equate the genocide of European Jewry with a mere inconvenience.
I don’t know if Hicks and Judy just lack the empathy to understand why Jews might find this over-the-top rhetoric offensive, or if they just don’t care?
Disbarred attorney — blecch! Just reading that, I need to go wash my paws. A further point I would make is that the Warsaw Ghetto Jews didn’t fill out background check forms or get anyone’s permission when they started shooting back at German soldiers. If anything like that ever happens in our country (the scenario that seems to feed rightwing paranoid fantasies), I very much doubt a background check law would stop anyone from acquiring or using weapons in such an all-bets-are-off situation.
Using their guns to fight government agents is such an entrenched fantasy in the NRA that they will never give up on this particular meme, even when it’s debunked.
Ahhhh yes, history. Yep, there was gun registration in Germany under the Nazis. Just like there was gun registration in Germany under Weimar. Just like there was gun registration in Germany under the Kaiser. But when the Nazis increased the length of time a registration was valid before needing to be renewed uh..that was…uh…something…something…a way to come for the guns that were already registered…trampling on the rights Germans had never had in the first place about unregistered guns….because… HITLER!
I had to spend time with one of those nuts a year ago. It wasn’t a surprise that this person’s favorite movie was Red Dawn.
“Using their guns to fight government agents is such an entrenched fantasy in the NRA that they will never give up on this particular meme, even when it’s debunked.”
This would be an absurd fantasy in any country with a functioning government, but it’s especially foolish when the government in question is the one which actually invented nuclear weapons — and has been the only government ever to use them. The idea of these fools using their peashooters to take on tanks, helicopters, fighter jets, ground-attack airplanes, cruise missiles, armed killer flying robots — all directed via satellite communications! — is beyond risible. More than anything else they say or do, this fantasy makes me seriously question their sanity.
The fences the gun nuts want built around the country can be used to keep people in as well as out.
Facists are always ready and willing to accuse anyone else of tyranny.
@6 No shit, Sherlock.
When Afghanistan’s government was overthrown by a communist-led army coup in 1978, Afghanistan was a country with an armed citizenry and no gun control laws. In addition, the bulk of the army’s troops quickly defected to the resistance, and within a short time, the resistance also began receiving outside aid and support, including military weaponry. Here’s what happened to that armed citizenry:
When high school girls in Kabul marched in demonstrations, they were machine-gunned by armed helicopters, and the survivors were arrested up and hauled off to prisons where they were tortured and killed.
When a mob in the city of Herat killed 100 Soviet advisers and dependents, Soviet tanks and planes slaughtered 5,000 of them.
When resistance fighters attacked Soviet truck convoys, the Soviet forces used jets, helicopter gunships, artillery, tanks, and infantry troops to level their villages and wipe out entire village populations to the last elder, women, and child.
The new regime systematically rounded up village mullahs and elders, leaders of other political parties and political opponents, and anyone else who might pose a threat to the regime, and executed them by the tens of thousands.
Two-thirds of Afghanistan’s rural villages were destroyed. Ninety-eight percent of its agricultural production was eliminated. More than a million Afghans were killed, and half of the surviving population became refugees.
Our NRA friends might argue the Afghan resistance won the war, which therefore proves that an armed citizenry is proof against a tyrannical regime. There are a lot of things wrong with this argument. The resistance didn’t win a military victory; they did achieve a stalemate (I’ll return to this in a moment), and the Soviets eventually withdrew their troops. But this victory needs to be qualified on a number of levels. First, the Soviets called their forces in Afghanistan a “Limited Contingent,” and for once they weren’t lying; the Soviet Union had no intention of conquering Afghanistan and never went all-in. Like the U.S. in Iraq, they wanted to limit their commitment (about 2% of the Soviet army was deployed to Afghanistan), and when the “bleeding wound” (Gorbachev’s words) of the inconclusive guerrilla war began weighing too much on them, they voluntarily withdrew.
As regards the military situation, it’s important to realize that the resistance fought the Soviet army to a draw not with citizen-owned weapons, but with military-grade weaponry. A portion of that came from outside aid, but the bulk of it was Soviet-made weaponry either captured or bought from Soviet troops. (The Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan were so poorly fed — their officers often stole food meant for the troops, or the supplies simply didn’t get through — that they routinely sold pilfered weapons to Afghans and used the money to buy food in local shops.) The U.S. sent hundreds of millions of dollars of cash and weapons to Pakistan to give to the resistance, but a lot of that was skimmed off the top by the Pakistanis, and most of what reached the Afghans went to just one of the seven Afghan resistance organizations (because it was the Afghan faction favored by the Muslim-fundie-leaning Pakistani military and intelligence services), which happened to be the least effective of the resistance organizations and the one that did the least fighting (and, when the did fight, it often was against other Afghan resistance groups instead of the communist enemy). So, the Western military aid really wasn’t a significant factor in the war; the Soviet-Afghan War was most fought with Soviet-sourced weapons on both sides.
Even though the Soviet invaders were unable to completely crush the resistance or secure a military victory, the resistance (the “armed citizens”) could not save their country from devastation or protect their families. The Afghan people suffered indescribable brutalities at the hands of the Soviet invaders and the Afghan regime. The majority of the country’s communities ceased to exist, its economy was totally shut down, and its population was subjected to systematic terror and genocide. So much for “armed citizens” keeping tyranny at bay.
Meanwhile, we Americans are being asked by the NRA and gun nuts to endure an endless stream of school, workplace, and movie theater shootings, mass slaughters, gang warfare, paranoid drunks and cranks shooting their neighbors, and toddlers playing with guns shooting their toddler siblings and cousins, all in the name of sustaining this “armed citizen” fantasy against an undefined enemy that seems to consist of our own democratically elected government and, basically, each other. Some of these people even think it’s a good thing when “armed citizens” refuse to obey our laws and point weapons at law enforcement officers. Sensible rabbits don’t agree with any of this, nor do sensible people agree with it.
It’s clear a huge majority of Americans want sensible gun controls. Background checks are a common-sense and minimally-intrusive safeguard to help keep guns from falling into the wrong hands — certainly not effective enough to solve America’s gun violence problem, but potentially effective to lower the mayhem by a notch. In other words, helpful. Asking for instant background checks isn’t asking for much, but the gun nuts have responded to that by demanding “open carry” and swaggering into restaurants and stores with handguns swinging in holsters on their hips and parading on public sidewalks with rifles and shotguns slung over their shoulders.
In other words, there isn’t going to be any negotiation or compromise. The pro-gun people are belligerent as all get out, want to turn America into a Somalia or Afghanistan as far as guns are concerned, and can’t be reasoned with on any level.
That leaves us the Second Amendment and an extremist Republican-dominated Supreme Court’s interpretation of it. So let’s just amend the damn thing. I’m not saying repealing it, nor am I advocating confiscating all the guns; I’m merely saying let’s change the wording just enough to make gun ownership and possession a privilege, not a right, so that it can be regulated to keep guns away from people who obviously shouldn’t have them. And, while we’re at it, let’s also insert a clause that makes it clear that a person’s right to his life is given a higher priority by our Constitution than another person’s prerogative to have or use a gun, so that aberrations like Florida’s “stand your ground” law will be an unconstitutional intrusion upon our right to not be killed by trigger-happy vigilantes and can be struck down by federal, if not state, courts.
Republicans attract some interesting candidates:
“The Fresno County man who campaigned for governor this year has been arrested in connection with the shooting of his neighbor and the slaying of a horse Thursday afternoon.
“Tye ‘Glenn’ Champ, 48, … previously served a prison term for manslaughter, has several convictions for weapons offenses and is also a registered sex offender. …
“Witnesses … reported a ‘neighbor dispute’ over work being done on a road …, Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims said. … Champ first approached a 13-year-old boy … ‘angry at the 13-year-old and slashed the tires on the ATV that the child was riding,’ Mims said. ‘The parents came to the scene and … that’s when the father was shot, then other witnesses — including the victim and the 13-year-old — ran away as more shots were being fired at them from Champ.’ A horse in a nearby pasture was hit by gunfire and killed. Mims said Champ was ‘shooting pretty indiscriminately … it’s fortunate no one else was hit.’ …
“Champ is a ‘felon with an extensive criminal history …,’ Mims said. In 1998, Champ, who was working then as a garbage hauler, was arrested in the killing of a rival trash hauler … [who] was run over by a pickup truck while he was on a collection route …. Champ was originally charged with murder but pleaded no contest to manslaughter. He served a term at Wasco State Prison. In 1993, he was convicted of two counts of assault with intent to commit rape and was placed on the state’s sex offender registry. The weapons offenses involved two convictions of carrying a concealed weapon. …
“Champ campaigned in this year’s California primary on a platform that he would clean up state government. He had a brief, scheduled appearance on the dais during the California Republican Party convention in March and attracted 2% of the total vote in June.”
http://www.fresnobee.com/2014/.....rylink=cpy
Roger Rabbit Commentary: This is a twofer — a GOP candidate and a poster boy for gun control, all rolled into one. I wonder if Brian Judy would defend this guy’s “right” to have a gun? Even more interesting is the question of how this incident might have ended if the boy’s father had been a fanatical advocate of (a) open carry and (b) stand your ground laws. I suspect that would’ve impaired Mr. Champ’s (c) Second Amendment prerogatives and (d) political career with extreme prejudice.
According to the Associated Press version of the story, Champ is a “Jesus freak” who “found God” while in prison and campaigned as “a whole new breed of Christian soldier.”
Roger Rabbit Commentary: You gotta watch out for those Christian soldiers, especially the ones with guns. Because they believe their sins have been washed away and God will forgive them for anything, they lack normal inhibitions and are liable to do almost anything, such as slashing a kid’s tires, gut-shooting his dad, and gunning down a horse. You see, it’s all for a good cause, he’s doing God’s work now, so it’ll all work out in the end.
I think God wants him to serve in a prison ministry and save inmate souls. For the next, say, 75 years or so.