Doug wrote:Most nations have gun control laws, yet few have genocide. And some nations with genocide have inflicted this genocide on armed victims.
To paraphrase:
Many people smoke cigarettes, but few get lung cancer. And some people that get lung cancer have never smoked.
Doug still doesn't get it. Sav does, and gives a good example of critical thinking. (He agrees with me.
) The claim that
gun control contributes to genocide is rather trivial and rather broad. The meaning of "contributes" could be anything from the weak
eating breakfast contributes to posting on FayFreethinkers forum to something as strong as
cigarette smoking contributes to lung cancer. Disagreeing with the claim is both illogical and sheer obstinance. Sav takes the logical approach and admits my (JPFO's) claim is true, and says basically "so what?".
Sav, I would like to go on to more substantive claims (pehaps your suggestion of "statistically increases the chances"), but there seems little reason to do so as long as people reject such obvious truisms as the current formulation. Let's finish the easy question, and try to elicit some minimum level of objectivity, before we move on to something else.
BTW Sav, some researchers at Washington university posed the question in a way similar to what you suggest, using "contributes to the probability." To wit:
The question of genocide is one of manifest importance in the closing years of a century that has been extraordinary for the quality and quantity of its bloodshed. As Elie Wiesel has rightly pointed out, "This century is the most violent in recorded history. Never have so many people participated in the killing of so many people." Recent events in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and many other parts of the world make it clear that the book has not yet been closed on the evil of official mass murder. Contemporary scholars have little explored the preconditions of genocide. Still less have they asked
whether a society’s weapons policy might be one of the institutional arrangements that contributes to the probability of its government engaging in some of the more extreme varieties of outrage. Though it is a long step between being disarmed and being murdered–one does not usually lead to the other–but it is nevertheless an arresting reality that
not one of the principal genocides of the twentieth century, and there have been dozens, has been inflicted on a population that was armed. -
Of Holocausts and Gun Control
(Emphasis mine.) Note that the veracity of last sentence depends on how "principal genocides" is defined. The article is well worth reading, making some of the same points we've made here. E.g. They give what I've called the praxeological argument:
When victims have guns, the overwhelming advantage otherwise enjoyed by physically superior or more numerous aggressors is diminished. One (usually unintended) consequence of an effective ban on citizen firearms ownership is to weaken the weak and strengthen the strong relative to one another. It is not embellishment to call this effect a "cause" of genocide, because it foreseeably expedites this outcome by lowering the costs of predation. In practical effect, moreover, the matter is even more stark, because gun bans are never universal. By definition they do not operate on people whom government illegally supplies with guns such as government officials.[8]
To summarize: from the point of view of any aggressor, it is desirable if not essential that intended victims not possess weapons, especially firearms. This principle holds true whether the subject is a gangster premeditating a crime or a government planning a genocide. This is an inherently dangerous incentive structure. It seems to us indefensible to fail to acknowledge its potential for mischief even if at the end of the day one decides that "tyranny" is too remote an evil, and an armed citizenry as a means of avoiding this evil too feeble, to repay its cost in accidental or unjustifiable bloodshed. We discuss these questions presently, but we turn first to a threshold question.
It also has a whole section about the practicality of self-defense against governments. An excerpt:
What can a man with a gun do against a formation of tanks? How could irregulars, even if armed with modern repeating rifles, confront the rockets and Gatling guns of helicopter gunships? Does anyone seriously believe that had the German Jews only been armed, they might have successfully resisted the troops who crushed the largest armies in Europe between 1939 and 1941? ...
But depicting the problem in this way trivializes an important point and is seriously misleading. An armed citizenry is not an insuperable bar to genocide any more than an armed policeman is an insuperable bar to crime or a strong army an insuperable bar to aggression. The real question is whether a generally armed citizenry is capable of raising the expected cost of genocide (or for that matter ordinary crime) to a potential predator enough to make such disasters less likely to occur than would otherwise be the case, or if the disaster should befall, to make possible the escape of some victims and the resistance of others.
In grappling with these questions, one probably should not consider the Holocaust as the prototype, for it is probably best thought of as an aberrant example in which it might not have made much difference had the victim population been armed. The Holocaust is atypical because Jews were only one half percent or so of an indifferent and sometimes actively hostile continental population. ...
Nevertheless, virtually all the other recent examples point quite in the other direction. For example, had the Cambodian civilians of the 1970s been as well-armed as American civilians are, it is far from obvious that the Khmer Rouges, whose army numbered less than one hundred thousand troops, could have murdered as many of them as they did. Indeed, the Khmer Rouges behaved as though they agreed with this assessment. The Cambodian people were already largely disarmed because guns had been prohibited from the time of the French occupation. Even so, the Khmer Rouge leadership wanted to make sure and took the extraordinary precaution of a nationwide house-to-house, hut-to-hut search to confirm that the country was indeed defenseless. Once it was sure, the army clubbed and bayoneted to death two or more million people, which amounted to almost a third of the country's population. ...
Consider the story that some Armenians lived to tell about the Turkish genocide of the early 1900s. Having systematically disarmed Armenians through a series of decrees over a twenty-five year period, the Turkish army and police were able to round up and kill over one million Armenians by a combination of overt murders and forced marches over hundreds of miles without food or water. However, thousands of Armenians from Aleppo province (modern Syria), who had secreted guns, took to the hills. Having defeated the first Turkish army units sent against them, they retreated from stronger forces in good order, until they reached the sea where the British, who were at war with the Turks, evacuated them. ...
Or consider Indonesia, where a half-million suspected Communists were slaughtered in the mid-1960s by fellow civilians armed, among other ways, with firearms lent to them for the express purpose by the Indonesian government.[113] The entire undertaking would have been complicated beyond calculation, and perhaps would have been if not abandoned at least carried out on a more modest scale, had the population been more heavily armed.
The cases of Uganda and Indonesia also show that the alternative to genocide may be civil war if a genocide target is sufficiently well-armed to fight back. One might well consider such an outcome equally as unappealing as genocide (although probably not if one were a member of the victim group). But civil war is not necessarily the result. The first Turkish atrocities against the Armenians occurred in the 1890s and largely involved civilian proxies specially armed by the government to kill Armenians, who were slaughtered by the tens of thousands. Where Armenians were armed they fought back, and in fact were quite successful not only against civilian irregulars but against regular army troops as well. Perhaps out of fear that civil war or prolonged disorders might provoke foreign intervention, the army recalled the arms from its proxies and ended the attacks (though the government also confiscated the Armenians' arms, facilitating the second genocide twenty years later). Something similar seems to have occurred in the American South during the early 1960s. Southern police officers were in many cases content to see blacks and civil rights workers brutalized, and in a few cases even killed, so long as the violence was one-sided. However, when blacks displayed arms for self-defense, the police intervened to halt KKK outrages lest they lead to gun battles in the streets and other disorders.
Anyway, excellent article. Billy Bob sez check it out.
