The Night of Broken Glass

On the night of November 9, 1938, Nazi para-military units stormed into the Jewish sections of German cities, kicked down doors, smashed windows, burned down buildings, and eventually rounded up 30,000 Jewish men and sent them off to concentration camps. This night was the first step in Adolf Hitler’s final solution which resulted in over 6 million Jewish people slaughtered in concentration camps. It was called The Night of the Broken Glass because the following morning the streets of these cities were littered in broken glass from the many store and house windows that had been shattered the night before.

This atrocity was allowed to happen because in March 1938, the Nazis passed gun control laws which gave them the power to confiscate guns from the Jewish people, leaving them extremely vulnerable to this type of attack. The Nazis stormed the Jewish sections of the cities under the pretext of confiscating any remaining guns. Everyone who lived through that night, knew the Nazis were absolutely wrong, but they had no way of fighting back, they had no way of defending themselves because they had no guns. The government had disarmed the Jews strictly for the purpose of exerting their power like they did that night. This level of imbalance of power should never be allowed to be established in any country because when it is, massive atrocities usually follow.

All of the mass murders committed by governments in the last 100+ years have occurred after the government had disarmed its citizens. In 1911, the Turkish government imposed gun restrictions on its people, and then ethnically cleansed over one and a half million Armenian Christians. In 1929, the Soviet Union took guns from the Russian people, and Stalin’s government eventually used the people’s vulnerability to kill 20 million citizens. In 1935, the National Chinese government implemented extreme gun restrictions, and Mao Zedong use that power to arrest and kill over 50 million political dissidents. In the 1970’s, Uganda’s government killed over 300,000 Christians after instituting gun control laws. In 1956, gun restriction laws were passed in Cambodia, and Pol Pot used that power to arrest and kill two million Cambodians between 1976-78. In 1994, Rwanda disarmed the Tutsi people and subsequently murdered 800,000 Tutsis. The Uyghurs dying in concentration and forced labor camps in present day China, are not allowed to possess firearms