Year: 2010

I know our opponents hate it when we bring up the ‘N’ word, but Dave Kopel quotes for us a 2009 article by Stephen Halbrook in the St. Thomas Law Review:

That brings us back to Alfred Flatow. [The article provides a case study of Flatow, a Jewish veteran of the German army, who competed for Germany in the 1896 Olympics.] What if he – and an unknown number of other Germans, Jews and non-Jews alike – had not registered his firearms in 1932? Or if the Weimar Republic had not decreed firearm registration at all? What if the Nazis, when they took power in 1933 and disarmed social democrats and other political enemies, or when they decided to repress the entire Jewish population in 1938, did not have police records of registered firearm owners? Can it be said with certainty that no one, either individually or in groups small or large, would have resisted Nazi depredations?

One wonders what thoughts may have occurred to Alfred Flatow in 1942 when he was dying of starvation at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Perhaps memories of the 1896 Olympics and of a better Germany flashed before his eyes. Did he have second thoughts, maybe repeated many times before, on whether he should have registered his revolver and two pocket pistols in 1932 as decreed by the Weimar Republic? Or whether he should have obediently surrendered them at a Berlin police station in 1938 as ordered by Nazi decree, only to be taken into Gestapo custody? We will never know, but it is difficult to imagine that he had no regrets.

Now our opponents tell us we can’t talk about the mass disarmament that preceded the Holocaust, because that’s just a ridiculous thing, you know. But it seems to me that the firearms policies of mass murdering totalitarian states are highly relevant to the debate over the scope of a constitutional amendment that was meant, ultimately, to be a check on governmental power.

We’re told by our opponents that mass registration is harmless, and under normal circumstances it probably is. But I think there’s a strong argument to be made that registration infringes on the core purpose of checking governmental power, whether that power is a totalitarian murder on a mass scale, or the more common history in our country of local law enforcement colluding with domestic terror organizations for the purposes of keeping disfavored racial minorities subjugated.

We’d like to think we’re more enlightened than that now, but that strikes me as hubris. Where flawed humans are involved, it’s never a wise to rely on the better angels of our nature.

Iowa is one of the states that has no Right to Keep and Bear Arms provision in its constitution. The one being proposed leaves little weasel room:

The NRA would like Iowans to add the following words to the state Constitution: “The right of individuals to acquire, keep, possess, transport, and use arms to defend life and liberty and for all other legitimate purposes is fundamental and inviolable. Licensing registration, special taxation, or any other measure that suppresses or discourages the free exercise of this right is forbidden.

Except I think there’s a word missing from that, namely “bear.” Couldn’t we make this “acquire, keep, bear, possess, transport, and use arms,” is the same language that’s in the Second Amendment too controversial for Iowa? I mean, I’d love to use the word carry, but why not bear if carry implies too much?

UPDATE: Apparently the full text is as follows:

The right of individuals to acquire, keep, possess, transport, carry, and use arms to defend life and liberty and for all other legitimate purposes is fundamental and inviolable. Licensing, registration, special taxation, or any other measure that suppresses or discourages the free exercise of this right is forbidden.

The reporting paper apparently left a key word there out.