In Germany in 2023 there were 13,844, “knife crime” incidents and last month a Syrian “soldier of the Islamic State” stabbed three people to death and wounded eight others at a “Diversity Festival” in Solingen. That got the attention of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who seeks to reduce the length of knives people are allowed to carry from 4.7 inches to 2.4 inches. Chancellor Scholz may be unaware that Theodoric the Great was ahead of the curve on knife control. As Edward Gibbon explains:
At the close of a glorious life, the king of Italy discovered that he had excited the hatred of a people whose happiness he had so assiduously labored to promote; and his mind was soured by indignation, jealousy, and the bitterness of unrequited love. The Gothic conqueror condescended to disarm the unwarlike natives of Italy, interdicting all weapons of offence, and excepting only a small knife for domestic use.
As relatives of the German murder victims might note, Chancellor Scholz has not proposed limiting the number of Islamic State “soldiers,” who might decide to violate the knife rules, just as criminals and terrorists violate the countless gun laws in the United States. When “Soldier of Allah” Nidal Hasan gunned down 13 Americans in 2009, including a pregnant woman, the composite character president called it “workplace violence” not terrorism, or even “gun violence.” In 2015 in San Bernardino, Islamic terrorists Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik shot dead 14 people of diverse ethnicities. California attorney general Kamala Harris failed to call the mass murder a hate crime or gun violence. For the Democrats’ presidential candidate, it all depends on the identity of the shooter.
Sen. Harris once proposed a mandatory “buyback” program for what she calls “assault weapons,” the civilian version of the AR-15. Trouble is, the owners did not buy these rifles from the government, which cannot buy them back. If anybody thought Harris wants to confiscate guns it would be hard to blame them.
In America, the people have the right to keep and bear arms, but as Chancellor Scholz might know, it wasn’t that way in National Socialist Germany. The people would be wise to check out Stephen P. Halbrook’s Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming Jews and “Enemies of the State and Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance, the first scholarly work on the subject. As the author notes:
“A disarmed populace that is taught that it has no rights other than what the government decrees as positive law is obviously more susceptible to totalitarian rule and is less able to resist oppression.” By contrast, “an armed populace with a political culture of allowed constitutional and natural rights that they are motivated to fight for is less likely to fall under the sway of a tyranny.”
Meanwhile, the Biden-Harris administration has allowed ten million illegals to enter the country with no background checks. No word from the administration how many criminals, terrorists and Islamic State soldiers are among the ten million, where they might be residing, or how many will be allowed to vote in November.
