In Weimar Germany, immediately following World War I, Communists and other leftists tried to overthrow the government. One way they were defeated was by the government banning and seizing guns. Keep in mind a democracy did this. German gun control stopped a Communist revolution. The Nazis, when they came to power, loosened gun control.
Yeah, not even. What stopped the Communists, who were busily conducting their own little reigns of terror and purges in 1919-20, were the
Freikorps, essentially right-wing unemployed vets led by warlords who were armed with the surplus weapons of the Great War in more or less the same array as Imperial infantry formations in 1918, save for the omission for the most part of light artillery weapons which they lacked the logistics to support. The German police were utterly ineffective at quelling the Commies, and same goes for the Treaty-permitted but toothless
Reichswehr which was only slightly more heavily armed than the police. It was
Freikorps units, manned by desperate men skilled in small unit tactics and armed with small arms, grenades, and Maxims who beat the Reds back into line then.
Now, assuming the DUmmie actually
did mean the
real Weimar Republic that emerged after the chaos of 1919-20, which is possible but would show a truly singularly-accurate knowledge of real history by a DUmmie, the Commies were never actually in revolt. They were, however, even bigger thugs than the Nazis (Just without the racial aspect) and had plenty of weapons salted away for the Big Day, but were pursuing victory at the ballot box as their primary strategy, mainly by methods remarkably similar to the Democrats today...efforts to terrorize opposition voters, intimidation or harassment of opposition parties by legal or extra-legal means, promises to punish the class enemies of the masses, freebies for all the downtrodden, Internationalism with the Bolshevik brothers and sisters in other lands, seizure and redistribution of the property of anyone deemed to have 'Too much,' and all that sort of 99% claptrap that lies under a thin coat of paint in the Donk appeal to the rabble today...
Well,
then, if the
real Weimar Republic is the topic, what
actually happened was that the Commies intimidated or pissed off everyone in the military, police, and middle and upper class so badly that those groups were willing to put up with the Nazis as a necessary counterbalance to the Reds. The majority of the German populace had no particular antipathy to the Jews, but the Reds were such a huge threat that the the voters chose to ignore that aspect of the Nazi platform as a stupid foible irrelevant to them. The fact that a significant strength of the Reds lay in the working-class and academic Jewish communities had the unfortunate effect of making the Nazi racialist stupidity more palatable and even plausible than it otherwise would have been.
The prospect of Red electoral triumph, no matter how dirty the tactics used to gain it (And it was clear to all that the Reds would stick at nothing), in light of then-recent events in the former Russian Empire and particularly to Germans in the Ukraine who had been brought in under the Tsar to improve agriculture, seemed to lead directly to an outcome of massive upheaval, purges, persecutions, land and property seizures, and other general mayhem. In this environment, the police and still-castrated
Reichswehr turned a blind eye to Nazi paramilitarism and the stockpiling of weapons by organized anti-Communist groups.* The only people effectively disarmed in the Weimar Republic thus turned out to be the law-abiding, independent, unradicalized poor bastards caught in the middle
Unfortunately, the Weimar Republic proved to have a ridiculously inadequate set of checks and balances, and what ones there were proved to be far too poorly-rooted to withstand the hurricane of an out-of-control executive who could ram through 'Emergency legislation' that essentially vested all governmental power in himself while preserving some outward forms of democratic government, purely for show. Now that being the case, are the structures and policies of such a government really the ones we should look to as a model for pursuing current social issues.
*Like
Stahlhelm, nominally a WW1 veterans' organization, but one full of the Freikorps vets who were virulently anti-Communist, which eventually merged with the Nazis during their ascendancy. And, while one is tempted to say with respect to all these
de facto Nazi supporters "A mistake, in retrospect," we can't really know for sure any better than they did at the time, since Red ascendancy over the Nazis and other more Centrist parties could have resulted in a bloodbath the equal of Stalin's
Holodomor in the Ukraine and the tens of millions killed in his other political persecutions, quite possibly resulting in a further cascade of megadeath as Stalin and a German client state sought to crush Poland and the Western democracies, conceivably enforcing a bloody reign of terror across the entire continent of Europe...it is not impossible that the outcome could actually have been even worse if the Reds
had managed to overcome the Nazis. The die is only rolled once, so we'll never know, and probably just as well at that.
