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Thursday, October 30, 2003

North Korea and the 2nd Amendment

Oh man! Excuse me while I go blow chow after reading this story regarding North Korea:
"Family members of traitors don't even get food rations. They are starved to death, "said the wife of Soon Yong Bum, a fishing boat captain.... Lee, who asked that her given name not be used, was a clerk in a government office who notarized the deaths in her town. She is a pretty young woman, 29, with tumbling hair curling to her shoulders and smooth, flawless skin that belies the hardships she has faced and struggles to explain. "We started seeing cannibalism," she recalled, pausing. "You probably won't understand."

She went on: "When one is very hungry, one can go crazy. One woman in my town killed her 7-month-old baby, and ate the baby with another woman. That woman's son reported them both to the authorities.

"I can't condemn cannibalism. Not that I wanted to eat human meat, but we were so hungry. It was common that people went to a fresh grave and dug up a body to eat meat. I witnessed a woman being questioned for cannibalism. She said it tasted good."

When I read stories such as these, I wish the citizens of North Korea had been armed to the hilt like Americans. Perhaps the horrors there would have happened anyway, but at least it would have been a deterrent

I'm a hypocrite when it comes to guns. I've never owned and can't see ever owning a gun. Yet I think it's very important that citizens be armed in order to avoid genocide/politocide. In my opinion, it's worth the thousands of potential extra gun deaths per year we endure.

Many people say it can't happen here. Contemplate this:
Consider a thought experiment suggested by Professor Robert Cottrol. Let us travel by some means back in time to the year 1900, and there convene a committee of the most exalted thinkers from all over the world. We inform them that within fifty years a great and cultured nation will try to exterminate, with near success, one of its most important ethnic, racial, or religious minorities. We now ask them to forecast who the victim group and the perpetrator nation will be. Would any predict the Holocaust?

It is hard to see why anyone would. Jews as a likely victim group might have been foreseen, though other candidates would surely have ranked higher. As for potential perpetrators, surely the United States would have been high on the list, what with that proverbial culture of guns and violence that Europeans find so quaint, to say nothing of our many minorities--immigrant, indigenous and racial. Germany, the homeland of music, philosophy, mathematics, public sanitation, environmentalism, physical culture, social security, and the rule of law could hardly have figured at all."
In other words, don't think it couldn't happen here. Sure it won't happen tomorrow, but from now to eternity is a long time for things to change for the worse. It could have happened already when we interned Japanese Americans during WWII. If the war had gone particularly badly, and Japan had invaded the mainland, are we sure it wouldn't have happened?

As the article points out, when the Nazis came to power, "first, they forbade Jews from owning guns or any other weapon." In other words, the confiscated the Jews' firearms. And then they slaughtered them. When the authorities come to collect your guns, it's time to go buy your gravestone (though it won't do you much good in a mass grave).

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