In response to the killings in Copenhagen last month — in which a culture-enriching “Danish” kinetic activist attacked a café and a synagogue — the Danish government has acted in a manner that is remarkably similar to the response of the state of Connecticut to the mass murder in Newtown in December 2012: it implemented a program of mass disarmament because of the actions of a single gunman.
In the Danish case, the order to disarm Hjemmeværnet (the Home Guard) wasn’t the result of legislation or action by the entire government, but the decision of a single general with socialist inclinations. As may be expected, parties on the Left support the order, while those on the Right tend to oppose it.
Below are excerpts from an article about the action from The Local:
Danish Home Guard to disarm after terror attack
Some 4,300 volunteer members of the Danish Home Guard are being told to disassemble their rifles in light of the fact that one of the weapons used in February’s shootings in Copenhagen was a stolen military rifle.
One of the weapons used in February’s terror attack in Copenhagen was an M95 rifle that had previously been stolen from the home of a Danish Home Guard (Hjemmeværnet) member.
As a result, the Home Guard has now decided that it will temporarily require all Home Guard members to turn in the bolts to their rifles, making them unable to be fired.
Over 4,300 volunteer members have a Home Guard issued weapon and they now have until March 30th to turn in their bolts, which will be stored in central depots across the country. The military service says it will then implement a long-term solution for dealing with members’ weapons.
“In light of the tragic events on February 14-15, 2015, the Home Guard is implementing these security measures until the Home Guard has found the proper solution,” Home Guard General Major Finn Winkler said in a statement.
In addition to being asked to disarm their rifles, the Home Guard members will also be subjected to periodic visits from controllers who will check that the weapons are stored safely and properly.
Prior to the new measures, members were already required to store their rifle and bolt separately behind lock and key. But thieves have managed to get their hands on the military weapons and one of the stolen rifles was used by Omar el-Hussein in the twin shootings that killed two men and injured six police officers in Copenhagen last month.
Our Danish correspondent Kepiblanc sends the following observations about the politics of disarmament in Denmark:
Well, Baron, this ain’t over till the fat lady sings.
Yes, people are outraged and the government just lost some 100,000 potential voters. However, it appears that the order came from one desktop general — a socialist, of course — who had not checked with his superiors. He is panicking and claims that the order is ‘temporary’ and that the bolts will be released when the current ‘terror threat’ is over (sic!). Maybe he knows something no one else does…?
Nevertheless the debate is furious. Many soldiers are handing in their — now useless — weapons and quitting the force. A rather stupid thing to do, since that is exactly what the socialists want. It’s better to threaten them with staying than to threaten leaving.
It isn’t so much a matter of weapons, though. Anyone can get a firearm without much effort, and the number of legal firearms in private homes is 750,000 as of 2013. That’s 15% of the populace. The greater issue here is the loss of social confidence and coherence. The Home Guard (or National Guard or ‘Territorial Army’) fulfills many civil tasks such as assisting the police, fire brigades and ambulance services. Whenever there is a major public event — rock concerts, market fairs, sports events etc. — or when natural disasters such as blizzards or floods strike, the force is in place helping the citizens.
So now the volunteers feel mistrusted — and with good reason. Stirring up this matter just now could very well be a shot in the present regime’s own foot. Some politicians from the right side have already smelled the smoke and are making this an issue in the upcoming elections. As the saying is right now: when other nations feel threatened they ramp up their preparedness; the Danes dismantle theirs…
By the way, it’s really bad timing from the socialist general: Today a brand new movie about the ‘short war’ — i.e. the Nazi attack on Denmark, April 9th 1940 — hits the screens. The movie is said to place the responsibility on the treacherous politicians of that time, who had almost disarmed our army and immediately surrendered to the Germans. They ordered the units in Southern Jutland to stop fighting, but the message did not reach some platoons who kept on. This resulted in 16 fatalities on the Danish side and 230 on the German. The platoons were ‘mobile’ on bicycles whereas the Nazis had armored vehicles and battle tanks!
On the other hand: I’ve not seen the movie yet, but if it’s anything like all other Danish movies — and American ones — I guess the soldiers are the bad guys and the enemy the good…
We’ll see… The movie trailer is here.
It ain’t over…
Hat tip for the article: Fjordman.
Re: “As the saying is right now: when other nations feel threatened they ramp up their preparedness; the Danes dismantle theirs…”
Yes, that is precisely the point. On the eve of the Second World War, Denmark reduced the size of its already understrength military in the face of German might, hoping to placate her increasingly-aggressive neighbor. The historically-informed already know how “well” that turned out – as the Danes offered no significant resistance to the invasion by the Germany military in April, 1940. Could the Danes have defeated the Germans? No, but they could have made the invasion and subsequent occupation much more costly and given the Wehrmacht a black eye in the process. The Finns set the example to be emulated when the Soviets invaded them.
Backing down in the face of a determined enemy never works and only postpones the day of reckoning. Appeasement only makes the final cost of dealing with aggression that much higher.
Where is Holger Danske now that the Danes need him?
The Finnish fell in with Hitler. Finland became a fascist state and the swastika was used to identify their aircraft, that is why the Germans left them alone. Interesting to reflect though, that both the US and Britain supplied Finland with aircraft in the early years of that war while Germany supplied the Finns with aircraft toward the end.
Um, no. Finland didn’t become a fascist state, it remained a democracy throughout the war. The swastika was actually the heraldic device of the Von Rosenberg family, who donated the first airplane to the Finnish airforce. As a thank you, the Finns adopted the Rosenberg swastika as their insignia. The Finnish swastika was different in shape and colour than the nazi one, and was adopted to use a full decade before the nazis started to use theirs.
The Finns had no allies against the Soviet juggernaut, so had to choose the lesser evil, the Germans, to get much needed supplies and arms.
The Germans didn’t provide much assistance either, not compared to what they could have.
Under their earlier understanding with the communist government of the Soviet Union they had divested interest in the Baltics, going so far as to order ethnic Germans out, they wanted to use the Baltic Germans to repopulate the Central Government carved out of Poland.
There is an existing ‘terror threat,’ so the answer is to disarm the people who would protect the country from a ‘terror threat.’ Brilliant! I am sure that will work out great.
How much easier it would be to expel the enrichers than to continually accommodate them.
Got it in one!
” How much easier it would be to expel the enrichers than to continually accommodate them.”
A very good question indeed?
Let alone expel “them” . No one dares to stop importing these gold nuggets enthusiastically. They are a curiosity. Blonde Danish teenagers enjoy something different. They are lucky to have a gov. to import such tall poplars from Somalia. You see those Christian bigots fought so long with Saracens. We have to compensate for that sin. Ooops I mean hate of haters. You should not hate intolerance, even at the cost of murdering and raping you, otherwise how can you prove that you are not a racist? If you are a true humanist – like Scandinavians- then you can’t have a thought of your own, a faith of your own, you can’t stop any evil, or value, you can’t have a value to defend. They only faith or value you must have is the values of those the gov imports from Somalia. This will satisfy OIC and UN. That’s important.
Retreat my Danish friends. Don’t think for yourselves. You have an elected gov. to do the thinking and solving problems for you.
-Don’t import a jihadi/muslim and embrace him. !435 years of invasions and slaughter are not enough to learn a lesson. ??
– No we humanists have our own wisdom. We don’t need your wisdom or wisdom of history and the Ages.
I know .. I know… That’s how you turned Malmo into a Utopia.
Why are you attacking the Danes so harshly?
Where are you from? Canada, USA, Germany, France? Or maybe some other lovely place which is immune from the insane politics of the modern day?
If you are anywhere in the Western world the odds are that your immigration policies are similar to those in Denmark. So why are you picking on Danes when you should be arguing with the people in your own country?
“Potentially, a government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of force against legally disarmed victims.” Ayn Rand
“As the saying is right now: when other nations feel threatened they ramp up their preparedness; the Danes dismantle theirs…”
There you go. Socialist illogic at its core. The US also tries to legislate violence away with “gun free zones”.
Norway and Denmark’s unpreparedness on 9 April 1940 should have been a wake up call. Look to other small countries like Poland or Israel in terms of self defense because those times will come again.
As far as movies I’d recommend “Flame and Citron” which portrays a couple of hard fighting 1940’s Danes as the good guys.
Amazingly, during the fight in 1940 some photographers had the guts to capture a few movie sequences while under fire from the Nazis. For those of you who might be interested, they can be seen here. The voice-over is in Danish, but even if the movie is a bit grainy it’s quite obvious what’s going on.
What’s of special interest to soldiers is the effectiveness of the renowned Danish 20 mm Madsen machine cannon. It was mounted on the side carrier of a 4-cylinder Nimbus motorbike and could be unmounted, sighted in, loaded and fired in just a few seconds. The combination of an armor-penetrating, fast firing and extremely mobile gun was an unpleasant surprise to the Germans and the reason they took such heavy losses.
Furthermore, althought the use of bicycles might seem rediculous it made the infantry more mobile than the Germans in their trucks and tanks. One infantryman could carry a heavier load of ammo and every 8th man had a Madsen 8 mm machine gun on his bicycle. Finally, the Danish Krag-Joergensen 8 mm infantry rifle was far more precise and powerful than the German Mauser carbine and its magazine could be continously loaded from the rear, without the need for changing clips – which is a very useful feature prior to a bayonet attack.
The heavy German losses against a substantially inferior opponent made the German Wehmacht rethink their tactics, and much of it was implemented in the assault on the Soviet Union.
“althought the use of bicycles might seem rediculous”
The Japanese invasion of Malaysia and Singapore was spearheaded by soldiers on bicycles. In the right hands, even a sharpened pencil is a lethal weapon.
The pattern that I’m sensing is that small European countries seem to be dominated by a “surrender and integrate” mentality, the thought being something like “we’re too small to fight anyone, even 3 or 4 armed individuals, so we better surrender as much as possible and beg for annexation by the EU.”
Unfortunately this mentality is being extended to a ridiculously smaller force than nazi Germany.
If you want to understand the religious/philosophical stupidity behind the idea of disarming people, know that this comes from Dialectical materialism which is an underpinning of Marxist thought. The key concept is here:
“Materialism asserts the primacy of the material world: in short, matter precedes thought.” http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism
Therefore, weapons must preceed violent thought, therefore remove weapons and violent thought goes away, therefore violence goes away! Absolutely absurd.
In reality, thought precedes actions and thought is based on other thought such as hatred, which is often based on beliefs one is taught. The Marxists are never going to figure this out especially since most of them don’t even know they’re marxists. If you don’t even know what your religion is then it’s impossible to question it, which seems to be part of an intentional plan. (For example, convincing people that they aren’t following a religion simply because there’s no reference to God.)
Someone needs to write a marxist bible and start having church services where all these things are brought out into the open. Then maybe more people will start questioning things.
It’s also easier to herd a disarmed people about.
Here’s the thing about modern weapons – it gives the average man the same capability as a policeman and most light infantry. The elite hate that with a passion. Hence their obsession with disarming us.
Here’s the bottom line: those that wish to disarm you are telling you have no right to life. To them your life and your loved ones are worth nothing.
They are also declaring their supremacy over you by holding the value of your life as little as a pile of bricks.
Remember that when one of the elites nasty little smug spokesholes comes out and prattles on about gun confiscation.
That is what we are dealing with across the Western nations among the elites and their indentured servant class, and what they have in store for us is far worse than serfdom. Look at their handiwork during the last century and resulted in mass graves and slaughter on a scale never seen before, untold misery, slavery and impoverishment. This is what they will do once again if they have absolute power.
If the Danes were smart and had a bit of guts, they simply not turn in their weapons en mass. Call the government’s bluff.
It’s quite obvious that gun control is actually about controlling the population rather than controlling guns. The excuse used to try to get people to accept gun bans is that it prevents violence based on the marxist materialist assumption that social and psychological phenomenon, and thus behavior, are primarily caused by the presence of external inanimate objects.
Even the gun control proponents know that the vast majority of murders that are committed with a firearm are committed with a handgun. In fact the number of long gun murders is so low that more people die in fires started by candles, yet for some reason the Obama admin and allies are totally obsessed with banning long guns, even while claiming that it’s about reducing murders.
Anyone with a brain ought to be able to figure out that they aren’t concerned about the murder rate, so they aren’t optimizing their proposals for reducing the murder rate even according to their own friendly experts. (Forget for a second that banning handguns still won’t reduce murders.)
What they’re actually doing is optimizing their proposals for eliminating anyone’s ability to challenge the government. Long guns are much bigger threat to an illegitimate government than pistols are, so eliminating long guns is a much greater priority even among those who know that random murders are almost never committed with long guns.
“The excuse used to try to get people to accept gun bans …”
Forget about all the excuses and arguments used for gun bans. You’re not going to win the argument on the merits. You’ve either got the numbers on the ground or you don’t. And you don’t.
England, Australia, Sweden… those gun laws are coming to America. Connecticut, New York, New Jersey is the future for the US. Get ready for it.
I disagree with your summation of the facts.
Those gun laws were put into place long ago in the places you name. In the states where owning guns is permitted, no law will pass banning them. New York and Connecticut have laws on the books but so far they haven’t showed up to get anyone’s guns. Nor will they.
You’re extrapolating the rules of three Northern very blue, very urban states. I’ll add Chicago (not sure about the rest of Illinois) to your list. And Chicago is a perfect example of how the gun death count goes up when you ban guns. The drug dealers on Chicago’s south side have huge amounts of stockpiled weapons. Do you see the Chicago police moving in to take anything from those armories? I don’t either.
Individual states get quite a bit of revenue from hunting licenses. At a time when they need every penny, passing new gun laws isn’t going to happen.
There is a long history of gun ownership in this country and that’s not going to change just because you claim it will. The places that outlaw guns will probably continue to do so. The places that permit guns will continue in place.
Wait and see what happens in Connecticut. A passed law is not necessarily an enforceable law.
“They are also declaring their supremacy over you by holding the value of your life as little as a pile of bricks”
And they’re winning. With every law they sidestep, with every amendment they ignore, with each and every dirty step they place on the Constitution they are winning. And most people are happily going along with it.
The Danes have just as much guts as any Americans. And the Americans aren’t calling anyone’s bluff either.
“Wait and see what happens in Connecticut.”
Hi Dymphna,
I grew up in Hartford Connecticut and spent many happy years there. I graduated High School in New Jersey many years ago. Thank goodness I’m long ago gone from there.
But I’m very familiar with that part of the country and the people who live there. Their point of view is winning.
As much as it hurts to say it those gun laws will come nation wide. We don’t have the numbers or the will to stop it.
We still have 50 states. And even the encroachment of the federal government isn’t strong enough to change the culture and customs of the red states. I live surrounded by hunters in a poor rural region. Yes, they hunt and fish, etc., for sport but they use the game they kill to feed their families. Guns to the left of me, guns to the right of me, and venison from my neighbors when they have it to spare. Even the woman who cuts our hair is a dedicated hunter. She gave me TWO loins last hunting season, bless her. We also let people hunt on our property. Shotguns and bow hunting only; no rifles.
Thank heavens for these people. Otherwise the deer population would out-number the people. The other day, four deer lay down in our yard, weary from eating all the shubbery. It was cold and I didn’t want to go out to shoo them away (they leave deer ticks everywhere = Lyme Disease) but just standing at the door shouting over to them didn’t make them leave. They obviously felt I had a bad attitude so they proceeded to ignore me and continued lying there.
I will certainly be among the throngs in our state capitol should any of our General Assembly get infected with anti-gun fever – or fervor.
Here’s a recent MSM report on Connecticut:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/malloy-newtown-panel-recommendations-face-challenges-29446093
IIRC, the governor says there is no appetite for gun collection in his state.
Poland, for its size, has a decent military. They take it seriously. Same for Israel.
The Russians, if they wanted to, could surely take Poland but they would pay a heavy price. The Russians could walk through Norway in an afternoon.
Countries like Norway, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand etc. need to think about arming up. The US is on the way out so everyone else is on their own.
The Norwegian Heimevernet, (HV, ‘Home Guard’) has had some unfortunate incidents were mentally unstable members used their weapons to kill their family and others. Hence (from the 22 July Commission Report, p. 247):
“The mobilization of HV-02 after the terrorist attack in Oslo 22/7 revealed shortcomings and weak points which could have had adverse consequences if the crisis had demanded a faster and more powerful effort of the Armed Forces. It concerned notification, too few bulletproof vests and insufficient emergency ammunition. Moreover the area forces lacked firing pins for their MP5 weapons.”
So they had fancy clubs. The government trust the Guard soldiers to sacrifice their lives in an emergency but don’t trust them with working weapons. A raw deal. Don’t do it Denmark.
Is this a new twist on the phrase, “… rotten in Denmark”?
“We still have 50 states.”
Yes, but the 10th amendment, as much as I love it, is a relic of the past. The federal government steps all over the 10th amendment and the power of the federal government today has never been stronger. Try claiming states rights by enforcing immigration laws on your border like Arizona did. Federal courts say sorry, but no. Try claiming states rights by declining to bake a cake for a gay married couple. Federal courts say sorry, but no.
“And even the encroachment of the federal government isn’t strong enough to change the culture and customs of the red states.”
Sadly, yes it is. Through immigration alone, which is now out of the hands of Congress and the people, the Feds, by executive order or executive memo, I’m not sure which, are already changing the culture of red states. All they need is numbers in those red states to change the culture. They don’t care about defeating your arguments or winning your vote. Through immigration alone they will take your state. Texas is turning purple, New Hampshire, a long standing conservative New England state, is already purple. Which direction is Montana heading?
“Guns to the left of me, guns to the right of me, and venison from my neighbors when they have it to spare.”
Yes, that’s how it is right now where you live and where I live. But what’s going to hold the line when the majority of people in our states are voting D, and federal power, which is now already unconstitutional, becomes power by decree? Used to be guns to the left of me and guns to the right of me in some of the places I grew up in too, Connecticut, New Jersey and Massachusetts. But not anymore.
The Leftists wanted uncontrolled immigration and a dumbed down population for a reason. And now they’ve got it. Neither Democrats nor Republicans will stop it. Unconstitutional growth of federal power, and uncontrolled immigration will lead to only one outcome.
Further to the guard and all…
The Royal Guard acctually arrested a police officer on 22. July, 2011.
(http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/terrorangrepet-22-juli/garden-paagrep-bevaepnet-politimann/a/10066212/)
And some pictures of the Royal Guard protecting the residence of the King (same date): http://www.vg.no/bildespesial/9029
Err.. do I need to tell you, at this point, that my father served (was selected, as is service is compulsory in Norway) in the Royal Guard? *proud*