Jews may not receive a permit
I saw a ridiculous item on Facebook yesterday, comparing Obama urging reform to gun laws while surrounded by children with Hitler urging reform to gun laws while surrounded by children.
Our friend Stewart found and translated an item from the Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro, 21 March 1938.
A new weapons law.
Berlin, 21 March. In the latest edition of the Reich law gazette a new weapons law is announced which was recently decided upon by the Reich government and which replaces the defensive weapons law of 1928, as well as a series of weapons directives from the emergency period.
The new law is the result of an examination of the weapons law in order to see which relaxations could be made in the current legal situation in the interests of the German weapons industry, without endangering the maintenance of public security. The pre-condition of any relaxation of the current weapons law must naturally be that the police authorities remain in a position to prevent without hindrance the acquisition and possession of weapons by unreliable persons.
The obvious fundamental point of ensuring that weapons are not possessed by enemies of the people and the state, as well as other elements that pose security risks, will be taken care of in the new law by enabling the police to forbid such persons from acquiring, possessing or using weapons of any sort. As this makes it possible to forbid any ownership of weapons considered undesirable by the police, it was possible to permit, among other things, a relaxation of the restrictive directives, in order to permit an improvement of conditions which would benefit the economic situation of the public in general and particularly that of the German weapons industry and the workers employed in it.
Thus, the acquisition of weapons will in the future only be possible with police permission, as far as pistols or revolvers goes. The necessity to obtain a permit to purchase ammunition is no longer in force.
The restrictions on the free circulation of cutting or thrusting weapons dating from the emergency period are, for the most part, rescinded.
In other ways, too, the law contains a series of relaxations compared to the current law. Of the many other new points, one should mention the basic prohibition on selling weapons or ammunition to those under 18 years of age. In addition, the granting of a permit for manufacturing or acquiring weapons will be linked to being of German nationality, to personal reliability and to functional aptness. Jews may not receive a permit.
The provisions of the new law, which goes into effect on the 1st of April this year, are supplemented by a comprehensive set of rules by the Reich Minister of the Interior, which has also been published in the Reich law gazette.
“Deutsches Nachrichtenbüro”, 21 March 1938
Not quite what Obama is suggesting.
OB, this looks very much in the style of “Christians For Michelle Bachman”, a satirical site well worth checking out.
https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=christians%20for%20michele%20bachmann
Whereas, a lot of gun rights people don’t want for black or Muslims to be armed, actually…
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1104820009536459/?type=3&theater
I get kinda offended when politicians, ANY politician, uses kids when trying to whip up sympathy and support for various causes that have nothing whatsoever to do with childhood.
It’s manipulative and smacks of emotional blackmail…as though to disagree is to not like kids.
As for the Hitler/Obama comparison…it’s big steaming pile of B.S.
Well, obviously, if the pose is similar the intention must be the same… *headdesk*
John, I’m not sure what you’re saying. Do you think gun safety has nothing to do with childhood? When children are regularly killing or being killed because of lax gun laws? Sometimes accidentally, sometimes not, but it seems it takes children being harmed by something before anything is done about it. 34 adults killed by gun violence? Nope, not worrisome. One child? Time to start worrying.
While I agree that I am bothered by seeing the way children are used to score political points in many cases, I don’t think I can agree that gun safety laws have nothing to do with childhood.
Is there any link between children and the Nazi gun laws? No. In fact, does the claim mean anything except that some gun-addled bloviator found a picture of Hitler with children and thought he could juxtapose it?
It might be worth mining the old print media for ‘touching’ anti-abortion messages from Hitler and Mussolini. In which cases the comparisons would be direct, and require no lying.
OK, so you were objecting to Hitler’s use of children. I can get that. From what you said, it sounded like you were equally objecting to both Hitler and Obama surrounding themselves with children. I think Obama is still being a bit manipulative, yes, but I wouldn’t say his gun laws have nothing to do with children.
Hitler, though, would probably say that his gun laws were protecting the children, because of the terrible things they often felt Jews were doing to Christian children (not true, but nonetheless…he believed it, or claimed to). Also, the NRA in calling for more guns, fewer laws, might surround themselves by children, saying that the more guns we have, the safer it is for the children (this is an argument, paraphrased, that they actually make). So while we can point to them using children and say, hey, that has nothing to do with children, they would disagree.
The problem comes down to, then, who gets to decide who uses the children, unless we want to just forbid using children to sell your product/idea/policy altogether (a proposal I have no problem with, at least in the sense of photo ops. It might still be necessary to discuss effects on children, but we could do it in a rational manner, without all the emotional manipulation of cute faces).
iknklast #8
“Hitler, though, would probably say that his gun laws were protecting the children”
That would only make sense if Hitler’s gun laws were a crackdown on ownership, which they weren’t. He reduced the minimum age for purchasing a weapon from 20 to 18, lifted limits on ammo purchases completely. The gun lobby are lying when they portray “Hitler’s gun laws” as some kind of taking guns away from people. They mainly relaxed existing restrictions and gave the police absolute power to decree that certain people were forbidden to own arms at all. Germany had political violence before Hitler, but no epidemic of school and disgruntled employee shootings. Hitler wanted everyone who agreed to be on his side well armed and everyone else dead. Hitler never went to the people and said anything about making Germany safer for its children. Duty lay in indoctrinating children in being National Socialist warriors. Jews had been forbidden to marry “Aryans” three years before the new 1938 laws and the year before that Hitler had had dozens of people he claimed were traitors killed without trial and took complete and open responsibility for it. None of this bears any comparison to the U.S., where you can make fun of people in power without being thrown into a concentration camp and there is an opposition party not legally barred from participating in an election.
Actually, Stewart, I was referring to Jewish people being unable to get a permit. I imagine he would say that is protection of the children.
I disagree; it doesn’t match the way he expressed himself. Forbidding Jews to own arms came a lot later than asserting that their existence inside Germany was a lethal peril to the entire German people (which, yes, incidentally includes children as well, but the risk Jews posed to children was portrayed as something quite other than shooting, as I hope you know).
http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/m/mills-mary/mills-00.html
Please note that it is the German children who are associated (in a positive sense) with weaponry; the Jews are mainly an insidious moral poison who did not, of course, shrink from specific real crimes.
So what I’m saying is that this line on the part of the gun lobby is not merely wrong in a clear factual sense, but it’s also extremely wrong-headed in its glib assumption that the situation in Nazi Germany is in any way, even roughly, analogous to today’s America. It’s almost exactly the opposite.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1105312136153913/?type=3&theater