[Ed: This timely article first appeared August 1 on TheTruthAboutGuns.com. Dr. Faria excerpted it from his latest book, America, Guns, and Freedom: A Journey Into Politics and the Public Health & Gun Control Movements (2019).
During the 20th century, more than 100 million people were exterminated by their own repressive governments, police states bent on destroying liberty and building communism, socialism, collectivism, and other worker utopias that turned out to be hells on Earth.
The myths that the public health establishment peddles — guns increase violent crime, and America is more violent than other nations — have been easily rebutted by numerous investigators who have exposed the phony statistics and biased selection data. Not to mention the fact that more unarmed people during the twentieth century have been exterminated by their own totalitarian governments than by war.
It has also become clear that guns save lives and that draconian gun control laws have almost always preceded genocide or mass murder of the people in what Professor Rummel called democide.
As David Kopel has pointed out, Japan may have a low crime rate, but citizens live in a virtual authoritarian state where the police keep full dossiers on every citizen, and “twice a year, each Japanese homeowner gets a visit from the local police to update files” on every aspect of the citizen’s home life.
Switzerland, on the other hand, a small, landlocked country, stood up against the Nazi threat during World War II because each and every male was an armed and free citizen. (The Swiss republic was the “Sister‑Republick” that the American Founding Fathers admired.)
Nazi Germany could have overwhelmed Switzerland, but the price was deemed too steep for the German high command. Instead, the Nazi juggernaut trampled over Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, Norway, and other countries, and avoided the armed Swiss nation, the “porcupine,” which was prepared for war and its military was ready to die rather than surrender.
As to what an armed population, such as those of the original 13 American colonies, did to obtain their independence is a well‑known story. Suffice to say, that the shot heard round the world was precipitated when the British attempted to seize the arms depot at Concord and disarm the American militia at Lexington in the colony of Massachusetts.
As to what an armed population can do to prevent the overthrow of their government by oppressive, communist movements, I recommend Larry Pratt’s excellent little tome, Armed People Victorious. Pratt is Executive Director Emeritus of Gun Owners of America.
Armed People Victorious vividly recounts stories of how two countries, teetering on the brink of disaster and as dissimilar as Guatemala and the Philippines, turned defeat into victory when the governments recognized that allowing and encouraging the people to form armed militias to protect themselves, their families, and their villages from communist insurgents in the 1980s, helped to preserve their freedom.
Why is this so important to ordinary Americans? First, because we are all citizens with rights as well as civic duties. We should understand the historical importance of attaining freedom and the constitutional necessity of preserving it.
Public health officials and researchers of “gun violence” have an obligation to reach their conclusions based on objective data, historical experience and scientific information, rather than ideology, emotionalism, expediency, or partisan politics. After all, the lessons of history sagaciously reveal that whenever and wherever science and medicine have been subordinated to the state — and individual freedom has been crushed by tyranny — the results for medical science, public health and society at large, have been as perverse as they have been disastrous.
The barbarity of Nazi doctors and Soviet and Cuban psychiatrists have amply demonstrated this. Beyond the abolition of freedom and dignity, the perversion of science and medicine becomes a vehicle for the imposition of slavery and totalitarianism.
Governments that trust their citizens with guns are governments that sustain and affirm individual freedom. Governments that do not trust their citizens with firearms tend to be despotic and tyrannical in time.
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— Miguel A. Faria, Jr, MD is a retired professor of Neurosurgery and Medical History at Mercer University School of Medicine. He founded Hacienda Publishing and is Associate Editor in Chief in Neuropsychiatry and World Affairs of Surgical Neurology International. He served on the CDC’s Injury Research Grant Review Committee.
All DRGO articles by Miguel A. Faria, Jr., MD
