This is what happens when governments take away all the guns.

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Rudy Rummel is professor of political science emeritus at the U. of Hawaii and a world-class authority on genocide. His most famous work is DEATH BY GOVENMENT in whiich he chronicles the deaths of c. 170 million helpless, disarmed civilians during the 20th Century. These are NOT ordinary civilian deaths in war. They are civilians deliberately targeted for death by governments, often their own government. The difference from ordinary civilian deaths in war is epitomized by the two Eritrea-Ethiopia Wars. In the first war 300,000 Eritrean civilians were brutally murdered because Ethiopia cold-bloodedly calculated that massacxring most of its Eritrean population would destroy the Eritrean independence movement. In the second, which occurred a decade later, Eritrea had established its independence and Ethiopia did not seek to kill civilians. Only a few hundred died as by-products of the war — a war so brutal that it killed over 100,000 soldiers on each side.
Rudy calls these civilian deaths “democide,” a term he coined to side-step the irrelevant (to his point) sub-classification of government murder campaigns into genocide (killing of an ethnic group), politicide (killing of a political group), religicide, etc. Without denying that democratic nations can rarely engage in democide, Rudy believes that democide is much more often a product of authoritarion, totalitarian governments. As the message forwarded hereby indicates, he has now written a series of alternate history novels based on his work. I have not yet read these novels but intend to.
NB: in case you were wondering, Rudy, who attended my seminar for academics interested in gun control issues, is not a believer in the nonsensical “common wisdom” that crime (or democide) can be reduced by disarming the victims and rendering them helpless against the murderers. He recognizes that the right to arms is a vital ingredient of a fre, democratic system.
Further NB: I presented a paper making this point at a UN human rights meeting in Geneva last year and shall make it again this year. It is not a point well received at UN, meetings whose attendes are divided into two groups. One is “public health” advocates. These are people who fervently believe that humanity is too stupid, ignorant and superstitious to govern itself and so must be guided by the superior wisdom of public health advocates backed by governmeant coercion. Public health advocates are humane, progressive people whose belief system (in effect, their religion) conditions them to always support government power in the abstract and all measures which reduce people’s ability to resist government. Public health advocates are devoted to arguing that the widespread possession of arms — more correctly, the possession of arms by criminals — was associated w/ c. 5 million victim deaths in the 20th Century. They never even consider that the deprivation of victim groups of arms was associated w/ 170 million deaths.
The other portion of the UN audience is less starry-eyed. It is composed of agents of governments that wish to disarm civilians in order to be able to commit democide in the future — many of them being currently or previously engaged in democide.