Perhaps restricting guns causes greater danger. Photo: Joe Loong.

A video made by terrorist Adam Pearlman, aka Azzam al-Amriki, urging Muslims to purchase guns and kill Americans, has sent a nation of 307 million people into hysteria. It seems that this frenzy has been enough to further restrict and limit the sales of guns. But wasn’t that the intention of the video?

Terrorism, by definition and design, instills terror in its audience to provoke an intended reaction, a desired reaction that cannot be accomplished by conventional measures. In other words, it is not only the damage of the terrorist act that is the goal, but rather it is also the reaction among the living that is the goal.

It is with that eye that the intelligent citizen views the acts and threats of terrorists. What everyone is rushing to do in response to terror, either terror in act or terror by threat, is most likely the intended response, the goal that was in the Result Statement of the terror plan. Therefore, the intelligent citizen chooses a different path; he chooses to consider what he needs to do to preserve his life and freedom, not just to react as terrorists would have him react.

And this, I suggest, is the case with the Amriki video. Indeed, Mayor Bloomberg and others rushed to use the video to further their campaign on the gun restriction front.

Fueling the video’s intended hysteria is Maxine Dovere’s June 29^th article published in these pages, where she makes the fear of terrorist access to guns a Jewish issue by asking “Is this not an open exhortation to target Jews and Jewish institutions?”

Far from easy gun access being a danger to the Jews and America, it is gun control that poses the greatest danger.

The damage from individual anti-Semites over history pales in comparison to the decimation by governments and their proxies against unarmed Jewish populations. Every act of genocide in the last 100 years has been preceded by gun control: the Armenian, the Ukrainian and the Holocaust. These gun control policies were deliberately designed to make sure that there would be no meaningful resistance.

But guns cannot be seized until the government knows who owns them. First registration, then greater and greater restrictions, usually coupled with some dramatic terrifying gun crimes to justify the greater control, then the call to surrender weapons and the door to door confiscation, using the lists of owners. Picked on one by one, most people—being unable to single-handedly maintain their gun ownership—surrender their guns. I am not writing about an imagined future. I am writing about the actual past in many countries.

The Nazis capitalized on the earlier gun registration requirements of the Weimar Republic. Among their first acts was the collection of the registered guns and barring Jews from owning guns and long knives. The Nazis certainly knew it was a necessary pre-requisite for unopposed annihilation.

There is nothing more dangerous than an unchecked government. The goodwill of the citizens and the history of freedom in a country are never sufficient to stop evil men from using the machines of administration to control or destroy.

You may protest that such intentions cannot be imputed to the current U.S. leadership and the proponents of the gun-control laws. But the intentions of the current government leaders are irrelevant. We may assume that they are all, bar none, benign people, wielding power wisely with only the best interests of the citizens at heart and mind. After all, only God knows what is in the hearts of men.

But their good intentions are irrelevant because it is not they who we fear. We fear those who will succeed them, seizing on the new power given to the government by the common people in a spasm of fear. Will the government that the new leader takes control of be so powerful that any bad intentions can be realized unopposed?

We just celebrated July 4, the day of independence, appreciating America’s freedom to live without interference. That freedom was envisioned by the founders of this country as essentially flowing from the very existence of man. Freedom is not a gift from the government; rather freedom is the fundamental state of existence. To ensure that freedom will continue, they crafted a Constitution to set up a system to ensure that freedom would be unhampered by government.  In fact, the Bill of Rights was controversial at the time because its opponents felt that putting the obvious in writing would create the impression that the rights came from the document rather than in-and-of themselves. Additionally, the document merely lists a few intrinsic rights and leaves others out, for better or worse, the Bill of Rights was established as a bare outline of rights.

Are we worthy of inheriting the freedom from the founders of this country if at the whiff of a threat from a terrorist on video, people rush to restrict gun ownership? Should we rush into confusion, thinking that the Second Amendment hinders our safety when in fact it guarantees our safety?

The issue is indeed a “critical national security issue,” not because of the risk of a few armed terrorists, but because of the danger to an unarmed population.

The Fix Gun Checks Act of 2011 and the Denying Firearms to Dangerous Terrorist Acts of 2011 have names that are so benign and inoffensive. After all, who would want to oppose denying firearms to dangerous terrorists? The semantics of politics indeed. But some would argue that the “fixit” patriotic bills to protect are part of a package, part of a movement to restrict, limit and ultimately ban guns. Many times, those who oppose guns oppose them all the way, and the piecemeal legislation, while frustratingly slow for them, advances their agenda one small step at a time. There is always a compelling reason for each step towards gun control.

The rules only restrict the common citizen, just like the mother who can no longer bring a bottle of formula onto a plane. Despite any amount of gun-control, the terrorist who want to obtain weapons will always find the means to do so.

A number of years back I met with Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah T. Healy, a vocal participant in Mayors Against Illegal Guns, as he traveled to Washington to lobby for increased gun restrictions. I told him that my perspective is based on my people’s collective and personal family memories of having been left unarmed and defenseless in the face of the Nazis and the Communists. We know what it is like to live in a country without guns and we therefore are opposed to efforts to whittle down the Second Amendment. We have experienced the end results of gun control.

I suggest that if Mr. Pearlman’s video helps pass the current gun legislation, he will indeed be pleased with his job well done.