Notes

[4] Id. at 81.

[5] Id.

[6] Id. at 81, 94.

[7] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 82.

[8] Id. at 79.

[9] Id. at 83.

[10] Id.

[11] Yves Ternon, Report on the Genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-16 in A Crime of Silence: The Armenian Genocide 117-18 (Gerald Libridian ed., London, Zed Books 1985), quoted in Simkin et al., supra note 2 at 83.

[12] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 98.

[13] Id., at 106-7.

[14] Id.

[15] Id.

[16] Financial rewards were offered for informants who turned in persons possessing unlicensed guns. Decree of the Council of People's Commissars, 10 December 1918, reprinted in 4 Decrees of Soviet Power 123 (Moscow 1968), reprinted in Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 123.

[17] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 98.

The decree also specified that minors could not be given arms unless the license specified the name of an adult who would be responsible. As in New York City (for handguns) and New Jersey (for all guns) under current laws, unlicensed persons were not permitted even for a moment to touch a firearm, even for supervised use at a range. Decree of the Council of People's Commissars on the Issuing, Keeping, and Handling of Firearms, reprinted in 9 Decrees of Soviet Power 104 (Moscow, 1978), reprinted in Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 129. ("It is absolutely forbidden to hand over weapons to anyone, whether for temporary use, or for storage.")

[18] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 101.

[19] Id.

[20] Id. The "crime bill" enacted by the United States Congress in August 1994 provides for the death penalty for offenders as young as thirteen-years-old. Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, 199th Pub. L. No. 103-332, 108 Stat. 1796.

[21] Id. at 100-04.

[22] Jay Simkin & Aaron Zelman, "Gun Control": Gateway to Tyranny (1992). The authors' copyright permission requires the following exact citation: "Gun Control": Gateway to Tyranny, Jay Simkin & Aaron Zelman, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, 2872 South Wentworth Avenue, Hartford, WI 53027, (262) 767-0760.

[23] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 150.

[24] Id. at 151.

[25] Id.

[26] Id.

[27] Id.

[28] Id. at 152.

[29] Id. at 153. The Nazis (on a pages per year basis) issued laws and regulations at 2.5 times the rate of the Weimar government. Id. at 155.

[30] Id. at 153.

[31] William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922-1945, at 184-85 (1984), quoted in Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 154.

[32] Id.

[33] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 163-70.

[34] As the then-head of the German police, Hermann Göring, stated, "I refuse the notion that the police are protective troops for Jewish stores. The police protect whoever comes into Germany legitimately, but not Jewish usurers." Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out 188 (Don B. Kates, Jr. ed., 1979).

[35] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 156.

[36] Id. at 156.

In the Atlanta suburb of Brownsville in 1906, the press incited the city over a non-existent epidemic of assaults on white women by blacks; a wave of beatings and shooting of blacks followed. The police arrested Negroes who armed themselves against further attack. American Violence: A Documentary History 237 (Richard Hofstadler & Michael Wallace, eds., 1971); see also Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies in American Violence and Vigilantism 210-11 (1975).

In Michigan, handgun permit laws were enacted after Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black, shot and killed a person in a mob that was attacking his house because he had just moved into an all-white neighborhood. The Detroit police stood nearby, refusing to restrain the angry crowd. Don B. Kates, Jr., History of Handgun Prohibition in the United States, in Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out, supra note 34, at 19. Indicted for first degree murder, Sweet was acquitted after a lengthy trial at which Clarence Darrow served as his attorney. Black newspapers such as the Amsterdam News and the Baltimore Herald vigorously defended blacks' right to use deadly force in self-defense against a mob. Walter White, The Sweet Trial, Crisis, Jan. 1926, at 125; Irving Stone, Clarence Darrow for the Defense 529-47 (1941); Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery 188-96 (1988).

Darrow summed up for the jury: "[T]hey may have been gunmen. They may have tried to murder. But they were not cowards . . . . [E]leven of them go into a house, gentlemen, with no police protection, in the face of a mob, and the hatred of a community, and take guns and ammunition and fight for their rights, and for your rights and for mine, and for the rights of every other human being that lives." Clarence Darrow, Attorney for the Damned 241-42 (Arthur Weinberg ed., 1957).

[37] See supra text accompanying notes 12-16.

[38] Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews 318-20 (1985).

[39] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 157.

[40] David I. Caplan, The Warsaw Ghetto: 10 Handguns Against Tyranny, Am. Rifleman, Feb. 1988, at 31.

[41] Caplan, supra note 40.

[42] Elliot Rothenberg, Jewish History Refutes Gun Control Activists, Am. Rifleman, Feb. 1988, at 30.

The Jews had built bunkers with underground tunnels, and grew increasingly well-armed with rifles, machineguns, handguns, grenades, and other explosives supplied by the Polish resistance, smuggled out of Nazi factories, or taken from dead Nazi soldiers. A major Nazi assault began on April 19, with the expectation that the ghetto would be cleared in time for Hitler's birthday on the 20th. The assault was led by a tank and two armored cars; a Jewish unit set the tank on fire twice, forcing a Nazi retreat. See Simkin et al., supra note 2; Caplan, supra note 40.

The Nazis returned with artillery, and after April 22, Nazi artillery drove many Jews into the Jewish tunnel system that connected with the sewers. The Nazis used poison gasses to attempt to clear the Jews out of the sewers. Nazi forces could not directly take on the buildings where the Jews had built hidden bunkers, cellars, and attics; room-to-room fighting would have inflicted unacceptably high casualties on the Nazis. So the Nazis began to burn down the Warsaw ghetto, one building at a time. Explosives and artillery were used to smash the buildings that were not flammable. On April 25, the Nazi commanding general recorded in his diary "this evening one can see a gigantic sea of flames." Even so, the Jewish will to resist was not broken. Finally, on May 15, the Warsaw synagogue was blown up, and the battle was over. In contrast to the usual result when the Nazis made an area into a "Jew-free-zone", there was nothing of economic value for the Nazis to take; to the contrary, the Nazis had been forced to pay a price in order to take Jewish lives. Id.

[43] Hilberg, supra note 38, at 499. For a full discussion of the Warsaw ghetto battle, see Yitzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory: Chronicle of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1993); Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, The Warsaw Ghetto: The First Battle to Re-Establish Israel (1993).

[44] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 158.

[45] The story can be found, among other places, in Harold Werner, Fighting Back: A Memoir of Jewish Resistance in World War II (1992); Yechiel Granatstein, The War of a Jewish Partisan (1986); Nechama Tec, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans (1993); and Chaika Grossman, The Underground Army: Fighters of the Bialystok Ghetto (1987).

For Jewish difficulty in obtaining arms for resistance, see Israel Gutman, The Armed Struggle of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Countries, in The Holocaust 457-98 (Leni Yahil ed. & Ina Friedman & Haya Galai trans., 1990).

[46] Another strength of the chapter is that the authors merely mention in passing, but do not elaborate on, their theory from their previous book that the Nazi gun law served as a model for America's Gun Control Act of 1968. Simkin et al, supra note 2, at 2. The theory is actually not quite as absurd as it might seem at first glance. The 1968 American law was primarily the work of Connecticut Senator Thomas J. Dodd, who served as a senior prosecutor on the American legal staff at the Nuremburg trials. Dodd was apparently familiar with the Nazi gun laws. See Lewis C. Coffin, Law Librarian, Library of Congress, to Senator Thomas J. Dodd, July 12, 1968 (sending Dodd a translation of the 1938 Nazi gun law, and noting that Dodd has supplied the Library of Congress with his own German text of the law). It is also true that Senator Dodd, as a Nuremburg prosecutor, had no reason in any of his professional work to need a copy of the German gun control law. Id. at 79-80. But the fact that Dodd was interested in the Nazi law is hardly proof, by itself, that the Nazi law was the basis for the American law.

Ultimately, any claim of linkage between the two laws must depend on common elements in those laws. What similarities do Simkin and Zelman see between the 1938 German law and the 1968 American law? Both laws: exempted the government from the controls that applied to law-abiding citizens; treated firearms ownership as a privilege granted by the government rather than as a right; and required that gun buyers meet some test of reliability. The 1968 American law requires the gun purchaser to affirm under felony penalty that he is not a convicted felon, dishonorably discharged from the military, an alcoholic, a drug user, or otherwise disqualified under federal law.) Simkin & Zelman, supra note 22, at 83. All these features are indeed common to the 1938 Nazi and 1968 American laws. But these features are common to virtually any gun control anywhere in the world. The premise of the vast majority of gun laws around the globe, before and after 1938, is that the government can be trusted with weapons, but certain classes of citizens should not, and accordingly gun acquisition or ownership should be regulated by the government so as to disarm those untrustworthy classes. These three common features, rather than proving that the American law derives from the Nazi law, simply prove that American and Nazi law both followed the standard world-wide pattern of gun control.

A fourth feature common to the Nazi and American laws is more intriguing. The Nazi law allowed guns with particular features to be banned based on governmental determination that they were not "sporting." The American law allowed the government to prohibit the import of guns which the government did not find to be "particularly suitable for or readily adaptable to sporting purposes." Gun Control Act of 1968, Pub. L. 90-618, 82 Stat. 1213 (codified as amended at 18 U.S.C. § 925(d)(3)).

The distinction between supposedly benign "sporting" weapons (supposedly used for killing animals) and other weapons (which might be used for killing government troops) is not, however, original to Nazi law. The 1921 Firearms Act in Great Britain, for example, set up a licensing system for handguns and rifles, but left shotguns unregulated. Although the Act did not use the word "sporting," the reason that shotguns were treated differently from rifles and handguns is that shotguns were seen as benign sports instruments for bird-hunting, whereas rifles and handguns were (in the wake of World War I) considered military weapons whose main purpose was anti-personnel. David B. Kopel, The Samurai, The Mountie, and The Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies? 78-79 (1992).

[47] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 187.

[48] Id. at 188.

[49] Id.

[50] Id.

[51] Id. at 190.

[52] Id. at 229-234.

[53] Id. at 230.

[54] Id. at 237. The law actually listed particular firearms manufacturers ("as for example, a rifle or carbine made by Henry, Winchester, Sneider [sic], Remington, etc.). Id. The 1971 Guatemalan law was one of the very few brand-specific gun control laws ever enacted, until American local governments began enacting "assault weapon" bans in the late 1980's that defined "assault weapon" not by characteristic, but by brand name and model. David B. Kopel, Hold Your Fire, Pol'y Rev., Jan. 1993, at 58.

[55] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 231.

[56] Id.

[57] Id.

[58] Id. at 232.

[59] Peter Calvert, Guatemala: A Nation in Turmoil 75 (1985), quoted in Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 232.

[60] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 232.

[61] Id.

[62] Id. at 233.

[63] Id.

[64] Id.

[65] Id.

[66] Id.

[67] By way of historical precedent, some American colonies bought guns for militiamen who could not afford their own. Don B. Kates, Jr., Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment, 82 Mich. L. Rev. 204, 215 n.46 (1983).

[68] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 233.

[69] Id.

[70] Id.

[71] Id.

[72] Id. at 234.

[73] Id. at 229.

[74] Id. at 234.

[75] Id.

[76] Amnesty International, Guatemala: The Human Rights Record 150-51 (1987), reprinted in Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 234. By way of disclosure, I should note that I have been a monthly donor to Amnesty International since 1984.

[77] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 234.

[78] Id. at 275, 280. See also Angus Denning et al., Idi Amin's Rule of Blood, Newsweek, Mar. 7, 1977, at 29.

[79] The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour: Excerpts of Bush News Conference, Saddam's Future; Gergen & Shields; A Quiet Patriotism (Educ. Broadcasting and GWETA television broadcast, Mar. 1, 1991).

[80] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 280; Lee Stokes, Iraq Warns Against Foreign Interference in Kuwait, UPI, Aug. 2, 1990, available in LEXIS, News Library, UPI File.

[81] Stokes, supra note 80.

[82] See excerpt from Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, Schwarzkopf, in Newsweek, Sept. 28, 1992, at 52.

[83] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 159.

[84] Hilberg, supra note 38, at 1048.

[85] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 269.

[86] Id. at 271.

[87] Id.

[88] Id. at 272.

[89] Id. at 274.

[90] Id. at 271, 274, 283-99.

[91] Id. at 277.

[92] Id. at 276.

[93] Id. at 278.

[94] Id. at 280.

[95] Id.

[96] Chet Lunner, Idi Amin Benefits from Desert Storm Protection, Gannett News Service, Feb. 11, 1991, available in LEXIS, News Library, GNS File.

[97] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 305.

[98] Id.

[99] Id.

[100] Id. at 305.

[101] Id. at 306.

[102] Id.

[103] Id.

[104] Alec Wilkinson, A Changed Vision of God, New Yorker, Jan. 24, 1994, at 54-55, quoted in Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 306. Similarly, one refugee recalled the days after the Cuban revolution overthrew Batista: "We believed [Castro] when he said we should surrender our arms because we did not need guns now that we were a free country . . . [and] we rushed to the police station to give up our guns." Lin Williams, The Rise of Castro: 'If only we hadn't given up our guns!', Medina County Gazette, Oct. 15, 1976, at 5.

[105] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 306.

[106] Id.

[107] Id. at 312.

[108] Pin Yathay, Stay Alive, My Son 102 (N.Y., Simon & Schuster 1987), quoted in Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 314.

[109] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 315.

[110] Id. As with the other nations studied, the authors use a conservative estimate for the total number of deaths. Other scholars of genocide put the number of killings in Cambodia much higher. R.J. Rummel, Death by Government 175 (1994).

[111] Simkin et al., supra note 2, at 316.

[112] Philip Shenon, Pol Pot, the Mass Murderer Who Is Still Alive and Well, N.Y. Times, Feb. 6, 1994, § 4 (Business), at 1.