Submitted by: Terry Payne
https://www.rand.org/pubs/
URL: https://science.sciencemag.
Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, No. 3, 483-535 (2000)
This attached article/research paper is excellent in describing gun control history in Nazi era. It is 55 pages long in PDF format due to many references but clearly depicts dangers in current administration’s aim to confiscate arms in name of crime prevention-a complete myth since despite thousands of federal, state and local gun laws existing on books gun related murders in large cities with illegal hand guns continue to soar (6368 in 2019). The Clinton era 1994-2004 Assault Weapons Ban did not produce any statistically significant impact on murders rates by guns. This should surprise no one familiar with gun features since most of the law’s provisions dealt with features like handles and magazine sizes on long guns. Most gun murders are committed in inner cities using illegal procured handguns.
Perhaps enforcing current laws would be a grand first step if democrats really want to reduce crime. Rifles and shotguns were involved in a combined 564 in 2019. Criminals don’t follow laws on guns or ammunition.
The Rand Corporation, a “research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier, and more prosperous,” released an ambitious review of existing firearms-related research earlier this month (Updated Aug. 16, 2018). This was the culmination of two years and a million dollars of effort.
The “Rand researchers evaluated thousands of studies to assess the available evidence for the effect of 13 common gun policies on a range of outcomes…”
Read that again: “Thousands of studies.” If you’ve read any of the major newspapers, you would have been led to believe that there has been no research on anything related to firearms since the Dickey amendment prohibited tax dollars being used to advocate for gun control, yet Rand managed to find thousands of studies that had been published since 2003 or had been cited at least 70 times. Well-known gun violence researchers Philip J. Cook and John J. Donohue published an article in Science last December (2017) that acknowledged that a lack of government funding research isn’t the obstacle to research some gun control proponents claim.
They noted, as did NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris Cox, that the National Institutes of Health spent more than $11 million on “gun violence-related” projects between 2014 and 2017 – and that certainly did not fund even a fraction of the studies reviewed by Rand.
After excluding studies that were not designed to identify causation (a necessity when studying the effect of a specific policy), the researchers identified 62 studies that met their realistic criteria. Most of the studies were excluded on the basis of their design or for other methodological concerns. Let’s examine some of their key findings and recommendations.
Rand found moderate evidence that dealer background checks may decrease firearm-related homicides. Of course, federal law requires every firearms dealer to conduct a background check on everyone purchasing a firearm. Rand deemed evidence concerning the effects of private-seller background checks on firearms-related homicides to be inconclusive and found limited evidence that background checks reduce violent crime and total homicides.
Rand identified “moderate evidence that laws prohibiting the purchase or possession of guns by individuals with some forms of mental illness reduce violent crime, and there is limited evidence that such laws reduce homicides in particular.” As such, Rand recommends states should include prohibiting mental health histories in their background checks records and recognizes that the “The most robust procedures involve sharing data…with the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.”
In other words, dealer background checks and an improved mental health records component of the background check system are two steps that can reduce violent crime and homicides. Rand notably found inconclusive results linking any of the most popular proposals from gun-control advocates with a reduction on violent crime.
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NAZI FIREARMS LAW AND THE DISARMING OF THE GERMAN JEWS
By Stephen P. Halbrook*
“We are in danger of forgetting that the Bill of Rights reflects experience with police excesses. It is not only under Nazi rule that police excesses are inimical to freedom. It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. It is too easy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end.”
Justice Felix Frankfurter1
“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.”
Adolph Hitler2
Gun control laws are depicted as benign and historically progressive.3
Justice William O. Douglas
* © Copyright 2000 by Stephen P. Halbrook. All rights reserved. The author holds a Ph.D. from Florida State University and a J.D. from Georgetown University. Located in Fairfax, Virginia, he litigates constitutional law issues in the federal courts, including the Supreme Court. His recent books include Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Right to Bear Arms, 1866-1876 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998); Target Switzerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II (New York: Sarpedon, 1998); Die Schweiz im Visier (Verlage Novalis Schaffhausen/Rothenhäusler Stäfa, CH, 1999); and La Suisse encerclée (Geneva: Editions Slatkine, 2000).
The author wishes to acknowledge Therese Klee Hathaway for her assistance in German translations and the following for their research assistance: Katya Andrusz, Jay Simkin, Lisa Halbrook-Stevenson, Heather Barry, and Dave Fischer.
Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law Vol. 17, No. 3 2000
However, German firearm laws and hysteria created against Jewish firearm owners played a major role in laying the groundwork for the eradication of German Jewry in the Holocaust. Disarming political opponents was a categorical imperative of the Nazi regime.4 The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution declares: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”5 This right, which reflects a universal and historical power of the people in a republic to resist tyranny,6 was not recognized in the German Reich.
This article addresses German firearms laws and Nazi policies and practices to disarm German citizens, particularly political opponents and Jews. It begins with an account of post-World War I chaos, which led to the enactment in 1928 by the liberal Weimar republic of Germany’s first comprehensive gun control law. Next, 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 five years of repression and eradication of dissidents, Hitler signed a new gun control law in 1938, which benefitted Nazi party members and entities, but denied firearm ownership to enemies of the state. Later that year, in Kristallnacht (the Night of the Broken Glass), in one fell swoop, the Nazi regime disarmed Germany’s Jews. Without any ability to defend themselves, the Jewish population could easily be sent to concentration camps for the Final Solution.
After World War II began, Nazi authorities continued to register and mistrust civilian firearm owners, and German resistance to the Nazi regime was unsuccessful.7 The above topic has never been the subject of a comprehensive account in the legal literature.8 This article is based on never before used sources from archives in Germany, German firearms laws and regulations, German and American newspapers
from the period, and historical literature. It contributes to the debate concerning firearms ownership in a democracy and presents the first scholarly analysis of the use of gun control laws and policies to establish the Hitler regime and to render political opponents and especially German Jews defenseless.
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1. Davis v. United States, 328 U.S. 582, 597 (1946) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting).
2. HITLER'S SECRET CONVERSATIONS 403 (Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens trans., 1961).
3. “But if watering down is the mode of the day, I would prefer to water down the Second Amendment rather than the Fourth Amendment.” Adams v. Williams, 407 U.S. 143, 152 (1972) (Douglas, J., dissenting). “There is no reason why all pistols should not be barred to everyone but the police.” Id. at 150-51.
4. Besides gun control, the Nazis were supposedly ahead of their time in such socially-responsible causes as the eradication of tobacco use. ROBERT N.
PROCTOR, THE NAZI WAR on CANCER (1999).
5. U.S. CONST., amend. II.
6. On the history of this right, see this author’s THAT EVERY MAN BE ARMED: THE EVOLUTION of a CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT (1984; reprint Independent Institute 1994); A RIGHT to BEAR ARMS: STATE and FEDERAL BILLS of RIGHTS and CONSTITUTIONAL
GUARANTEES (1989).
7. Infra, passim.
8. See David B. Kopel, Lethal Laws, N.Y. L. SCH. J. INT’L & COMP. L. 15 (1995); Don B. Kates & Daniel D. Polsby, Of Genocide and Disarmament, 86 CRIM. L. & CRIMINOLOGY 297 (1995). Although the disarming of the Jews as a prelude to and in the course of the Holocaust does not appear to be the subject of any historical study, numerous excellent studies have been published on armed Jewish resistance in the Nazi-occupied countries. E.g., SIMHA ROTEM (KAZIK), MEMOIRS OF A WARSAW GHETTO FIGHTER AND THE PAST WITHIN ME (1994); ANNY LATOUR, THE JEWISH RESISTANCE IN FRANCE, 1940-1944 (1970).
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