Imagine disarming all the members of one political party, but leaving guns in the hands of the other party. The Left has fantasies like this all the time. The Left is obsessed with violence, and constantly projects its bloody-minded intentions onto us.

Indeed, leftist fever dreams that Donald Trump is “another Hitler,” repeated incessantly and recklessly for the past eight years, ended with one unhinged young man trying to assassinate Mr. Trump a few days ago. Victor Davis Hanson offered a very partial catalog of the Left’s incitements to violence. They spoke of going after Trump:

By slugging his face (Robert De Niro), by decapitation (Kathy Griffin, Marilyn Manson), by stabbing (Shakespeare in the Park), by clubbing (Mickey Rourke), by shooting (Snoop Dogg), by poisoning (Anthony Bourdain), by bounty killing (George Lopez), by carrion eating his corpse (Pearl Jam), by suffocating (Larry Whilmore), by blowing him up (Madonna, Moby), by throwing him over a cliff (Rosie O’Donnell), just by generic “killing” him (Johnny Depp, Big Sean), or by martyring him (Reid Hoffman: “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”).

What about the actual words of the current occupant of the White House, Joe Biden?

How did this happen? pic.twitter.com/DsiX7nPxjR

— Ian Haworth (@ighaworth) July 14, 2024

Major media figures and desperately spinning Democrats went on TV to blame Trump’s rhetoric for the attack, as if he somehow brought it upon himself.

I have a sneaking suspicion that most liberal reporters don’t even know what the Democrats regularly say about Trump because they’re convinced only the Republicans use violent rhetoric. So Stephanopolous and Martha Raddatz went right to Trump and GOP statements and ignored Joe… pic.twitter.com/PV2h8xXHBz

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) July 14, 2024

But the dream of gaining an absolute monopoly of violence, and leaving one’s political enemies helpless, haunts people hungry for power. And in supposedly democratic Germany that nightmare just got real. The Blaze reports:

A German court has effectively banned all members of the Alternative for Germany (AFD) party from owning firearms.

The AFD is a right-leaning populist party that — like Marine le Pen’s National Rally party in France — has grown increasingly popular despite a concerted suppression campaign by the leftist German establishment, which has sought to ban, vilify, and criminalize the AFD outright.

The party was founded in 2013 by free market economists keen to strengthen German sovereignty and enraged by the European Union’s bailout of Greece and other debtor nations. Over time, the AFD attracted the ire of leftists over its members’ criticism of mass migration, open borders, gender ideology, climate alarmism, Islamization, and the European slide toward continental post-nationalism. …

In the wake of the AFD’s strong electoral showing last month, a Bavarian court ruled that the country’s domestic intelligence agency could surveil a regional association of the party as a suspected extremist group. In certain German states, such as Saxony and Thuringia, the party had already been classified as a “right-wing extremist” group.

Last week, leftist activists successfully petitioned to de-bank the AFD. Deutsche Welle reported that the AFD’s donation account had been deactivated and that the Berliner Volksbank confirmed its receipt of the leftists’ petition.

The AFD will not only find it difficult to raise money but find it impossible to raise firearms in self-defense against the kinds of savage attacks an AFD politician suffered in early June.

What If Trump Took Guns Away from Every Democrat?

It seems even more likely now, in the wake of this outrageous attack, that Trump might retake the White House in November. What if once in office, he revoked the gun rights of every registered Democrat … with the connivance of friendly judges whom he’d appointed? What would the media say? Can you even imagine the frenzy of warnings about an imminent “genocide” or “political purge”? And of course if that happened, such warnings would be 100% appropriate. (Of course, the drama queens of the MSM are already warning that Trump’s a threat to democracy, but that’s just based on their weird persecution fantasies.)

It’s tyrannical to strip people of basic human rights just because of their nonviolent political statements and views. As I show in my new book, No Second Amendment, No First, gun rights are basic human rights that flow from the biblical view of the person. Strip people of them unjustly (we’re not talking about felons or mental patients here), and you are dehumanizing them. And if history is any teacher, you’re also getting ready to oppress them, maybe even murder them.

In the twentieth century, governments intentionally killed at least 170 million of their own civilians, not including casualties of war. The slaughter took place worldwide, from China to Poland, from Cuba to Russia. What did all those victims have in common? They’d all been disarmed first by their governments.

Germany Has Ridden These Train Tracks Before

What makes the targeted disarming of political dissidents particularly ominous in Germany is that country’s dark history of politicized, discriminatory gun control. Historian Stephen Halbrook wrote an entire book about it: Gun Control in the Third Reich. He shows in granular detail how the Nazis used the gun-registration scheme imposed by the Weimar Republic — in a vain attempt to disarm real extremists left and right — to systematically disarm Jews, labor union members, and other perceived “enemies” of the regime. Halbrook marked the 75^th anniversary of the 1938 Kristallnacht nationwide assault on German Jews with a column documenting how the Nazis frantically moved to seize all legal firearms from them in preparation for that pogrom. He wrote:

By fall of 1938, the Nazis were ratcheting up measures to expropriate the assets of Jews. To ensure that they had no means of resistance, the Jews were ordered to surrender their firearms.

As Hitler would tell his cronies (recorded in the book Table Talk):

The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.

The Dictators’ Playbook

Hitler often lied about history, but in this case he was correct. One of the first measures Vladimir Lenin put in place after the Bolshevik coup in Russia was to seize private firearms so his agents could plunder churches, synagogues, and private property in general. Subsequent dictators from Mao in China to Castro in Cuba and Maduro in Venezuela have likewise disarmed the populace — before unleashing their savage persecutions of unpopular ethnic, religious, and political groups.

Our own Founding Fathers knew vividly the importance of private firearm ownership. They lifted much of the text of our Second Amendment directly from the English Bill of Rights (1689), which specifically linked gun rights with religious liberty for the long-persecuted Puritans. James Madison wrote in Federalist 46 that if all the mechanisms in the Constitution he’d crafted to frustrate tyranny failed, an armed citizenry would be the last backstop preventing a dictatorship. The Founders’ intention when they wrote the Second Amendment was to make possible

a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered … .

Anarchy for Me, Tyranny for Thee

All around the world, the globalist Left is openly persecuting its political opponents — most recently with an investigation launched against Marine le Pen and her patriotic political party, immediately after the far Left formed a coalition with pro-Hamas Islamist parties to keep her out of power.

Now think about the revelation late last week that at Fort Liberty (formerly North Carolina’s Fort Bragg), “anti-terrorist” training materials lumped in peaceful pro-life groups such as Operation Rescue with murderous militias such as ISIS. Meanwhile the FBI is infiltrating conservative churches and surveilling PTA moms as “domestic extremists.”

An anti-terrorism brief was held on Fort Liberty (Bragg) today where they listed several Pro-Life organizations as “terrorist organizations.”

The slide you see here followed right after a slide about ISIS, a terror group in the Middle East.

The organizations labeled by the… pic.twitter.com/vlO6XjyGzE

— Shoe (@samosaur) July 11, 2024

Then remember how the Antifa/BLM mobs that looted our cities went unpunished, while hundreds of peaceful January 6 protestors still rot in prison.

Then think about the frivolous prosecutions of Donald Trump, while Hunter Biden’s money-laundering and profiteering still goes uninvestigated.

Anarcho-tyranny, the selective prosecution and targeting of political opponents, is literally the playbook the Nazis used to rise to power. They’d start political street fights, confident that pro-Nazi judges would give brown-shirted thugs slaps on the wrist and imprison their opponents for defending themselves — you know, the way the Left treated Jake Gardner and Kyle Rittenhouse, among many others. After a few years of such terror, the Nazis controlled the streets and were able to bully the conservative parties into letting them join the government to avoid civil war. 

Keep all this historical background in mind the next time your political representatives or your local Regime Christian pastor call for “common sense” gun control initiatives in the name of protecting “public health” from the “gun-violence pandemic.”

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 10 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.