4 Tyrannical Regimes That Relied On Gun Confiscation To Maintain Power

David Chipman — President Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms — has a long history of supporting stringent gun regulations.

In addition to working for decades as an ATF agent and senior policy advisor at Giffords, Chipman openly admitted that he favors banning the AR-15 during his confirmation hearing.

“Your public position is that you want to ban AR-15s, is that correct?” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) asked Chipman. 

“With respect to the AR-15, I support a ban as has been presented in a Senate bill, and supported by the president,” Chipman responded plainly.

According to one estimate, Americans own 5 million AR-15s, rendering it one of the most popular firearms in the nation. Banning the weapon would therefore be easier said than done. 

In the low likelihood that President Biden successfully bans the AR-15, he would be following in the footsteps of history’s worst tyrants. Indeed, the last century is replete with examples of tyrannical leaders relying upon gun regulations to subjugate and oppress their own people.

Here are four regimes that used gun confiscation before going tyrannical.

Nazi Germany

The most infamous dictator of the twentieth century began his reign of terror by taking guns from German Jews.

As Independent Institute senior fellow Stephen Halbrook explains in National Review, Weimar Republic officials discovered that Nazi militants planned to seize power in 1931 and execute Jews who refused to surrender their firearms. After this revelation, the Weimar government “authorized the registration of all firearms” with the stipulation that the records “must not fall into the hands of any extremist group.”

Indeed, once he seized power two years later, Adolf Hitler “used the records to identify, disarm, and attack political opponents and Jews.” Police nullified the gun licenses of those who were not “politically reliable.” In 1938, Hitler signed legislation that prohibited Jews from “working in the firearms industry.” 

German Jews were then required to “surrender all their weapons” — a process that was enforced by the gun records obtained by police. Kristallnacht occurred weeks later.

“SS chief Heinrich Himmler.” explained Halbrook, “decreed that 20 years be served in a concentration camp by any Jew possessing a firearm. Rusty revolvers and bayonets from the Great War were confiscated from Jewish veterans who had served with distinction. Twenty thousand Jewish men were thrown into concentration camps, and had to pay ransoms to get released.”

Soviet Russia

The first communist revolutionaries began seizing firearms within a year of gaining power in Russia — even though such a development contradicted the original intentions of Vladimir Lenin.

“What kind of militia do we need, the proletariat, all the toiling people?” wrote Lenin in his “Letters from Afar.” “A genuine people’s militia, i.e., one that, first, consists of the entire population, of all adult citizens of both sexes; and, second, one that combines the functions of a people’s army with police functions, with the functions of the chief and fundamental organ of public order and public administration.”

Nevertheless, as the Mises Institute in Austria explains, the Council of People’s Commissar mandated in 1918 that Soviet citizens surrender their firearms or face imprisonment.

Later, Soviet satellite states — such as Bulgaria, East Germany, and Hungary — enacted similar gun regulations that rendered gun ownership nearly impossible.

Cambodia

The genocidal Khmer Rouge regime embarked on a gun regulation program of their own.

As a paper from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Switzerland explains, private gun ownership was mainly a reality for elites in Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge rose to power. Under the regime, gun ownership became far less common — for most people living in the country.

“Private weapons ownership remained strictly regulated,” reads the paper. “Yet children of well-connected government officials of ethnic Khmer origin mention their father’s private gun in their memoirs.”

One Cambodian “recalls that her father, a government employee overseeing import and export… had been provided with pistols for his work” — a “privilege associated with the status of his position.” 

By and large, “the relatively high cost of foreign-made firearms in relation to Cambodia’s purchasing power on the global market” ensured that private firearms acquisition was beyond the means of most Cambodians. Only those with “access to government” could acquire weapons.

“The Khmer Rouge regime eliminated the previous elite, and in the process effectively ended private gun ownership,” adds the study. 

Cuba

Like other Marxists, the Castros sought to confiscate guns from the Cuban people.

In a paper about gun violence in the United States, Cuban-born medical ethicist Miguel Faria recalled the famous 1959 words of Fidel Castro that inaugurated a program of rampant gun confiscation: “Guns, for what? To fight against whom? Against the Revolutionary government that has the support of the people?”

Fidel Castro began confiscating weapons after the Revolutionary Directorate — a militia group — threatening to topple the new government.

“Fidel Castro defused the situation and neutralized the defiance of the RD,” recounted Faria. “Shortly thereafter, Castro commenced his long-term campaign to disarm not only his confreres [colleagues] in the Revolutionary Directorate who had not joined him, but also, in due time, all Cubans. A 100,000-member ‘militia’ was organized to seek out the political opposition and actively disarm it.”

As with the Nazis, Castro was able to utilize the firearms registry created by his predecessors in Fulgencio Batista’s government against his own people.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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