In the course of writing Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon encountered Mohammed, who pursued the Jews with “implacable hatred” to the end of his life. The historian also called out Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogoth king who invaded Italy in 488 AD and “condescended to disarm the unwarlike natives of Italy, interdicting all weapons of offence, and excepting only a small knife for domestic use.” Call it an early display of the totalitarian mindset.
Wherever they hold sway, modern totalitarians disarm the people of firearms and ammunition. For details, see Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming Jews and “Enemies of the State,” by Stephen Halbrook. Hitler’s National Socialists used the registration records of the Weimar Republic to identify and disarm gun owners.
As Halbrook shows in Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance, the Nazis confiscated all firearms, even antique hunting rifles. That left the people vulnerable to wholesale slaughter. On June 10, 1944, four days after D-Day, troops of the 4th SS Panzer Regiment surrounded the village of Oradour-sur-Glane in central France. The attackers killed 245 women and 207 children, including six below the age of six months.
The 196 men killed included seven Jewish refugees from other parts of France. Of the 648 people murdered in the village, only 50 could be identified. The Nazis locked the women and children in the village church, shot indiscriminately, and set the victims on fire. The rest of the village was then looted and set ablaze.
As the late P.J. O’Rourke explained, this is what happens when those with all the power have all the guns. And to paraphrase inspector Claude Lebel (Michael Lonsdale) in The Day of the Jackal, be in no doubt that this is what the Biden Junta wants.
At every mass shooting, the default government response is to blame guns and make it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to exercise their constitutional right to keep and bear arms. This does not apply, however, to Muslim jihadists like “Soldier of Allah” Maj. Nidal Hasan. At Ford Hood in 2009 Hasan gunned down 13 unarmed American soldiers, including Pvt. Francheska Velez, who was pregnant. Hasan wounded more than 30 others, including Sgt. Alonzo Lunsford, who took seven bullets from the jihadist.
According to the composite character president David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, this was “workplace violence,” not terrorism or even “gun violence,” and the mass murderer Hasan got better medical treatment than his victims. In 2014, Lunsford sought to explain his plight to the president, who declined to meet with him. The composite character did not proclaim Islamic terrorist attacks in 2015 at San Bernardino (14 dead) and Orlando in 2016, (49 dead) as cases of “gun violence.”
Of all the various forms of government in the world, wrote Gibbon, “an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule.” The buffoonish Biden channels Obama, but the Delaware Democrat shapes up worse. On September 1, 2022, backdropped in red light with Marines at the ready, Biden targeted those who want the nation to be great as the primary threat to America. Biden’s FBI openly follows suit and in August the FBI killed Craig Robertson, a 75-year-old woodworker, for threats he had allegedly posted online.
Recall the Ruby Ridge siege of 1992, when the FBI deployed massive military force against a single family, and FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot dead Vicki Weaver as she held her infant daughter. That case prompted Senate hearings, but so far nothing on Robertson. Biden’s FBI shoots first and avoids questions later, so an escalation of deadly violence is not out of the question. Christmas 2023 may well be joyous, but 2024 shapes up as the year of living dangerously.