The Folly of Guns Versus "Government Tyranny"

When gun owners say they keep a firearm at home for protection against “government tyranny,” I wonder: Have they thought this through?

Let’s follow the logic where I doubt most gun owners have taken it.

No government entity -- whether local police, county sheriff, state troopers, the U.S. military, Homeland Security, the Border Patrol, or even the IRS -- has any interest in in any of us UNLESS we are already involved in criminal activity, or pose an imminent threat to others.

Tasked with providing examples from history, Second Amendment enthusiasts raise extreme cases, such as the canard that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union took away people’s guns as a step toward oppressing them. In the case of Hitler’s Germany, this is simply false, since the 1938 German Weapons Act expanded gun ownership rights in general; the Nazis only confiscated weapons in the racist case of a minority: Jewish citizens.

The Bolshevik example is more accurate, so far as it goes . . . but if you study the history of pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia and the Russian Revolution, you find a population that was mostly agricultural/pre-industrial and illiterate, centuries of state religion featuring a monarch regarded as God’s representative on earth, and a collapsing domestic economy after four years of world war that left in its wake massive national starvation and millions of returning, jobless veterans -- all significant pre-conditions that enabled a tiny cadre of Leninists to effect a violent takeover of the population centers of a vast nation.

In addition, the Soviet Union encompassed a variety of cultures with different languages (roughly 120) from Slavic, Baltic, Finnish, and Yiddish to Moldovan, Turkish, and Tajik; religions that ranged from Russian Orthodox Christianity, Catholicism, and various Protestant sects to Islam (and all were violently suppressed under Stalin); and many had rebelled against the Russian government before.

How many of the above conditions apply to the U.S., or are likely to any time soon? If we were to follow the logic of such historical examples, we should arm minorities such as African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews, and other habitual victims of racism. White Americans have nothing to fear.

What I don’t see Second Amendment supporters discuss is the one actual, real-life example from the past century when the U.S. government actually did confiscate tens of thousands of American citizens’ rifles, dynamite, and shortwave radios without due process, reasonable cause to suspect a crime, or evidence of a potential threat to public safety.

It happened to my mother and her family.

Five months passed between the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese navy in early December 1941 and May 13, 1942: the day my mother and all the other Japanese immigrants and their Japanese-American children in Hood River, Oregon were removed from their homes for a long rail trip to detention centers. But between those dates, the FBI and local sheriffs’ offices took away their guns, explosive materials, and radios, and searched their homes for such “contraband” without warrants.

My grandfather, Sagoro “Sam” Asai, had immigrated to the U.S. 32 years before, worked on the railroad, and bought land to farm in Hood River. By 1941, he and his wife had substantial apple-tree acreage, and a family of seven children. The Immigration Act of 1924 barred all Japanese and Chinese immigrants from seeking U.S. citizenship, so my grandfather could not apply for naturalization. There was no “path to citizenship” for him.

But his children, all born in this country, were legal U.S. citizens by birth. In fact, with war raging in Europe and looming in the Pacific, by December 7 two of his sons -- my Uncle Tot and Uncle Half -- were already serving in the U.S. Army. One had been drafted and one had volunteered.

According to my mother, “We were notified by the sheriff’s office” to turn in particular items. “We mostly delivered them to their office and the sheriff’s deputies went around and checked our homes for items not turned in. Some farmers forgot the dynamite in their barns/sheds and were arrested because of this.”

The rationale for these confiscations -- as well as the subsequent evacuation of 120,000 Japanese-American citizens and their immigrant forebears to camps for the duration of the war -- was to forestall traitorous acts of spying and sabotage.

But there were none: none on record, and none that occurred thereafter. U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle opposed the rounding up of the Japanese-Americans; and many other U.S. officials -- from FBI head J. Edgar Hoover to Lieutenant Commander Kenneth Ringle of the Office of Naval Intelligence -- were convinced the Japanese immigrants and their children posed no domestic threat.

Yet Roosevelt allowed pressure from racists in the U.S. Army and private interests who coveted property owned by Japanese immigrants and their descendants on the West Coast to press for internment. Confiscation of “contraband” was an intermediate step.

What did the Issei (first-generation immigrants) and Nisei (their U.S. citizen children, some of them grown adults) do when the government demanded their guns? Did they “fight government tyranny” by firing on government officials? They did not. Utterly loyal citizens, they gave up their “contraband.”

They did not try to fight back; they did not try to “defend their homes.” What would be the point? Everyone would die.

They took the properly patriotic course, instead: go quietly, but fight the injustice through legal channels, in the courts. It took a long time, and not a few people lost their land and homes -- some even committed suicide -- and the U.S. Supreme Court got it wrong initially, but it also found the government could not legally detain and intern loyal Japanese-Americans.

It took decades, but evidence eventually surfaced that government officials had withheld relevant information -- the fact that there had been zero incidents of disloyalty or sabotage among this population -- and Presidents Carter and Reagan and Congress agreed that the Japanese-Americans were owed an apology and reparations.

My mother says local government officials had assured everyone their goods would be safely stored until the war’s end. “After our return we were allowed to claim our items if we wished, but most of the items were outdated or useless. I remember that we did get back our standing short-wave radio and a Kodak camera with the old-fashioned accordion pull-out lens.”

No guns were returned. In the years that followed, Japanese-American citizens of Hood River occasionally thought they recognized their former possessions in the gun collections of sheriff’s deputies and their friends.

As best as I can divine them, Second Amendment enthusiasts seem to entertain a fantasy that they can somehow hold off the police, the army, or a foreign invasion with a private arsenal. I think they also assume their armed neighbors will automatically join them in a righteous DIY defensive force.

But when massive domestic chaos ensues, every man (or household) will more likely be fending for himself. That’s what people have done in civil wars and disintegrating societies throughout history.

Whether the catastrophe turns out to be (in descending order of likelihood) the collapse of domestic resource delivery (electricity, food, water) due to climatic change and/or massive industrial pollution, nuclear attack, foreign occupation, “government tyranny,” or zombie invasion . . . the only practical use for a gun would be to turn it on yourself.

That’s because the only thing you could “win” by firing at anything that approaches your home -- if it doesn’t overpower you or destroy the entire structure by bombing or flames -- would be another few minutes, hours, or days of survival before a longer, slower, more painful death.

My grandfather and his kids could have chosen to fight unconstitutional government oppression -- which wasn’t really the government so much as a manifestation of the racism and opportunistic greed of the neighbors of my grandfather and other West Coast Japanese-Americans. But if they had, they probably would have died in a firefight like Randy Weaver’s wife and son at Ruby Ridge in 1992, or 82 Branch Davidians in Waco in 1995.

In the first instance, the “government tyrants” lost one U.S. Marshal, and none in the second. The medical examiner who performed the autopsies in Waco found that at least a third of the victims’ deaths were probably the result of suicide, consensual execution, or forced execution by firearm or cyanide -- as would be the case in future incidents, I imagine.

Because he didn’t choose to fight like the Randy Weaver and David Koresh, Sagoro Asai lived another quarter century, and his grandchildren and great-grandchildren today include CPAs, lawyers, doctors, tech specialists, a writer-actor, and even a (female) US Air Force pilot.

That’s a much nicer ending than dying in a gun battle to defend one’s Second Amendment rights, don’t you think?