The Signal
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Film Makes Weak Case Against Gun Control
Commentary by Willy E. Gutman

On Assignment

The images are gruesome. They elicit a visceral response – part
nausea, part fascination. The atrocities they capture make us retch as
they splash the retina with an acid so corrosive and mesmerizing that
they linger in our mind’s eye long after we’ve stopped looking.

Flaunted in mercifully pithy film clips, evil in all its fulsomeness
is replayed before us. After a while, the images meld into one
swarming mass of broken bodies, blood and gore. This is the idiom of
fear, hatred, insanity and, ultimately, a testament to indifference in
the face of man’s unspeakable inhumanity to man.

Armenia, 1915-17: Nearly 2 million Armenians are massacred by the
Turks. The world looks on with brutish apathy.

The Soviet Union, 1929-45: More than 20 million perish in Stalin’s
gulags, purges and pogroms.

Hitler’s Germany and occupied Europe, 1933-45: Another 20 million –
Jews, gypsies, the physically and mentally challenged, gays,
Freemasons and political dissidents – are slaughtered.

>From 1927-49, ten million Chinese perish at the hands of a
"nationalist" regime, while at least 30 million more are decimated
between 1949 and 1976 during the Maoist "cultural revolution."

In Guatemala, some 300,000 Maya are exterminated during a 20-year
conflict engineered, funded and orchestrated by the United States. The
conflict officially ends in 1981 with a "reconciliation pact" that
whitewashes torture, mass murders and disappearances by exonerating
the criminals and denying the victims’ families any compensation.

>From 1971-79, more than 300,000 civilians are assassinated in Idi
Amin’s Uganda. Guerrilla war and human rights abuses under Milton
Obote (1980-85) claim another 100,000 lives.

Three million people, mostly intellectuals and professionals, are
butchered by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge from 1975-79. The dead are buried
in mass graves, later to be remembered as the "killing fields." To
save ammunition, the executioners use hammers, axes, spades and bamboo
sticks.

In 1994, tribal discord based on economics rather than ethnicity fuels
the murder of nearly 1 million Tutsis by disgruntled Hutu tribesmen in
Rwanda.

One by one, the images, spasmodic and mindbending, unroll in a
paroxysm of mangled skeletal remains, bleached bones and vacant,
unblinking eyes stilled by incomprehension or death.

Indeed, "Innocents Betrayed," a 58-minute montage of history’s most
infernal moments, aptly articulates the banality of evil.

Produced by "Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership Inc."
(JPFO) and marketed as a documentary, the film deftly intertwines
actual footage with an eloquent narration formulated to associate
firearm registration and confiscation with "death by government."

While chronicling indisputable events, "Innocents Betrayed," by
tenuous twists of logic, suggests that had the victims of the above
holocausts been armed, they might have survived.

Such inference, made post priori, is fallacious in that it assumes
that one event is caused by another merely because it follows it.

Failing to consider factors such as counter evidence – think Masada,
think the Warsaw Ghetto, think Waco, Texas – the film does not
convincingly explain how people would have resisted their tormentors
had they possessed firearms.

All it does is postulate that "disarmament is necessary to make
possible the mass murder of helpless citizens" – ergo, that citizens
should resist gun control and arm themselves.

In search of a rational connection between gun ownership and
protection against the overwhelming force of barbarians, renegade
states, totalitarian regimes and capricious governments, I also read
"Death by Gun Control," co-authored by JPFO executive director Aaron
Zelman and attorney Richard W. Stevens, producers and narrators of
"Innocents Betrayed." What I found, amid a plethora of facts and
sobering statistics, was a stream of illogicality and assumptions
contrived to link gun control with subjugation by an abusive
government, in this case, hypothetically, the U.S. government.

In 73 C.E., rather than face capture by the Romans, 1,000 Jewish
rebels – men, women and children – committed suicide on their
mountaintop stronghold in Masada. There is no empirical evidence that
they could have withstood the Roman onslaught, had they been armed.

Nor would the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, brave and indomitable in the
face of Nazi persecution, starvation, disease and deportations have
survived had they been equipped with more weapons. During the
uprising, 13,000 ghetto residents were killed, burned alive and gassed
in bunkers. The remaining 50,000 (from a total population estimated at
half a million), were exterminated at Treblinka and other death camps.

And during the 1993, fifty-one-day siege of the well-armed Branch
Davidian compound in Waco, after weeks of psych-war assaults, sleep
deprivation and all-night broadcasts of recordings of rabbits being
slaughtered, federal agents, backed by Army helicopters, tanks, tear
gas and flammable liquids slaughtered 74 people, among them 12
children. This colossal response to a very minimal threat suggests
that when governments are faced with small arms they will respond with
heavy artillery – perhaps even a nuclear bomb or two (think Hiroshima
and Nagasaki).

I don’t doubt the sincerity of the JPFO’s convictions. I am wary of
its conspicuously undeclared political agenda. Although Innocents
Betrayed is well worth viewing as a graphic reminder of the lunacy of
man, I found it simplistic and utopian at best, deceptive in the sham
implied altruism of its arguments and disturbing in its apocalyptic
romanticizing of gun ownership.

America has a violent and crime-ridden society, and I have yet to
determine whether the Second Amendment – as interpreted by the JPFO –
is part of the problem of part of the solution.

DVD and VHS copies of "Innocents Betrayed" and "Death by Gun Control"
can be purchased from the JFPO, P.O. Box 270143, Hartford, WI 53027,
1-800-869-1884.

Willy E. Gutman of Tehachapi is a veteran journalist on assignment in
Central America since 1991. His column reflects his own views, and not
necessarily those of The Signal.

Copyright: The Signal