Quote:
Originally Posted by ZenGum
When the government has artillery, tanks, an air force and an army with modern discipline and command structures, the civilians get massacred no matter how many selective fire individual weapons they may have.
Rifles in homes do not make genocide impossible.
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Zen, the history of genocide does NOT show that. Essentially, the reason is you don't use armored divisions for the actual genocide -- armies feel unendurably compromised if used for genocides, and this is always sloughed off on militias, organizations created especially for the genocide itself, or other outside-the-military groups. Let a single example represent the rest: the
Einsatzkommandos -- and by the term the Nazis meant something like "special auxiliary teams" -- were very lightly equipped. With gun control laws and legal delegitimization of armed self-defense, rifles were about as much as they needed. Well, a rifle opposes another rifle just fine, does it not? How would the fate of European Jewry have been different had every Jew in Europe a Kar 98 (a mere bolt-action rifle) and two hundred rounds of ready ammunition? I'm not sure a single Einsatzkommando would have survived the war!
While you might try citing the Warsaw Ghetto as an exception to the idea you don't use armored divisions to perform genocides, it fails on close examination: the Jews of Warsaw successfully repelled the lightly-armed Einsatzkommandos, starting with hardly any rifles whatsoever -- you could count their first rifles on the fingers of one hand -- and these had to be reinforced by the SS, with some mechanized fighting gear but nothing to speak of for tanks, Gestapo detachments organized as infantry, and the Romanian Iron Guard -- and the Gestapo ended up complaining about the behavior of the Iron Guard. It's not everybody that can gross out the Gestapo.
And you aren't very well versed in guerrilla warfare either -- a truism in unconventional warfare is that a lesser weapon may be used to obtain a greater, and then a greater again.
I've actually tried to study this stuff. Learning is why I say what I do. What I've learned is that armed societies are inoculated against genocides, and that this is true worldwide. I regret to inform you that what you thought you knew, you don't know.