There is no way people wouldn't defend their families from going to concentration camps if they were armed. History shows that this holds true. The Government is afraid of armed people as it should be. That is a good thing. Not bad.
Civilians standing alone do not stand a chance against the combined arms of a standing army. Does not matter if they all have guns or not. What counts is explosives, range, airpower - oh and the idea that one side has their families to worry about.
There was armed resistance to the rounding up - look at the warsaw ghetto. [1] This was armed civilians fighting an invading army, which took a huge German effort to subdue. But they did subdue it - in a way horrifically reminiscent of the US in Fallujah. (No I am not comparing US Army in Iraq to Nazis. But watch the footage on both events and then try to not worry)
If you think that the right to bear arms is there to stop tyranny, you should expand it to the right to bear Semtex, armoured vehicles and aircraft. That is why Afghanistan and Iraq were / are such a mess - the other side is fighting back with real weapons, not pop guns. Armies are frightened of other armies. Not armed civilians.
Oh, and the rise of UAVs is going to make the next insurgency a very different prospect.
Add in to this mix the basic human desire to think it is all going to go away, and no-one is that crazy. There is a story of a village running from the massacres in Rwanda, and they reach a river, and only one teenager crosses, the rest think they will be safe. The teenager is the only one left to tell the story.
Look at it this way - Hitler started small, targetting the criminals and the undesirables. Have you taken up arms to overthrown the White House now that Cuba is used for torture? What is your trigger point ? How do you find out that there are death camps? Warsaw happened because they rounded up Jews into one place before shipping them out. The Nazis learnt from that. Evil has analysts too.
What is the difference? It is not the grunts in the army. It is the need to have enlightened people in government. If we cant have that we will make do with sane politicans. The insane ones are harder to spot. You know Nixon used to end dinner chat at the white house with the line, "I could walk out of here and 45 minutes later, 500 million people would be dead?"
And number two: let's say you are a President of the USA. Let's say you do something really evil against the will of the people. Like - theoretically - sending all Mexicans to the camps. You say Mexicans are armed or not - no difference. Interesting.
However these genocides seem to take two (possibly three) forms
1. Hitler / Stalin Like a virus they replace the societal leadership function and use the "normal" mechanisms of law and order for their own ends. People are "arrested" and "tried" just like every day - but it is a farce.
Now at what point do you shoot a police officer? When is it socially acceptable to kill a cop? There just does not seem to be a point. So for years this can go on. Rounding up "criminals". I could put psychologists on stage to say "treatment of the whole family" is the solution for criminal activity - we are taking these families to family-re-start camps. You can make up anything for a while. Its only when the media provide proof that this is going on, that people are dying that maybe killing the next cop to arrest someone will be seen as righteous. But you could easily argue that 60 Minutes cannot be aired because it will incite people to shoot cops.
After the cop has arrested you, that's it, you have no guns, game over.
2. Serbia
This is very muddled but basically can be seen as just arrest / herd everyone out of a defined geographic area - for example it would be everyone in the street apart from #47 and #186. Round them all up with an army / militia and send everyone to a processing camp. Thus the removal of guns happens to a whole neighbourhood, and can be done with artillery and tanks. Cant arrest everyone cos they are all armed? Really it seems not to work like that. The mass graves in Serbia / Croatia are filled with military age people.
3. Rwanda. Half of your village attacks your family with knives. Imagine say the white folks in NYC deciding to kill the black folks using pitchforks [1]. This is hardly a controlled genocide so is less crime against humanity than WTF.
I was focusing on the first one - there seems to be no point where shooting a cop (even one in a black shirt) is something acceptable, even for people who would otherwise shoot back.
There is something built into us that perceives immediate danger as a threat, but if danger is kept far enough apart from the "now" we rationalise it away - even if it is bleedin' obvious. Its why i supported Blair/Bush invading Iraq - I mean the guy had a track record, of course he had WMD.
Jews having guns in Germany would not have stopped Hitler due to their relatively small numbers, but it would have been completely proper for them all to defend themselves instead of having their families sent to slaughter.
If a dozen people are coming to attack my home, I'll probably lose that fight, but it doesn't mean I won't attempt to defend myself with a gun if I can rather than just capitulate to their brutality.
Of course there's also a drastic difference between Hitler and Stalin's gulags vs the Japanese internment camps. While a complete violation of their rights, there was never any consideration toward committing genocide against the Japanese in the camps.
