As you all know by now, one the ways that I put gruel on our table and keep the wolf from our door is to work as a copy editor of English translations for Dispatch International.
Last week I had to grit my teeth while I edited an article that compared the controversy in Sweden about immigration with the fight over gun control in the United States. It was a typical European perspective on guns in the USA — faithfully reflecting the talking points aired on most American MSM outlets — and it was all I could do to keep from inserting my own editorial comments as I cleaned up punctuation and adjusted the phrasing in the original.
I wrote a protest email to Lars Hedegaard and Ingrid Carlqvist, the chief editors of DI, and they published it today on the paper’s website. The text is below, with a title and subhead added by the editors. The original article is behind a subscription paywall, but you can get the gist from the paragraphs I quote near the beginning of my riposte.
Cheap shots at Second Amendment
by Ned May
Björn Norström should do his homework before targeting American gun owners
As an American and a conservative, I must take exception to a translated opinion piece published in your most recent issue. It is entitled “When lobbyists, lies and feelings guide policies”, and was written by Björn Norström.
Mr. Norström posits an analogy between the gun control debate in the United States and the immigration debate in Sweden. I’m not qualified to judge the Swedish half of this comparison, but much of the American portion is quite simply wrong, and sometimes farcically so.
I recognize that the author was writing an opinion piece, and I have no issue with the parts of the essay that might be considered “opinion”. People are entitled to their opinions. But other parts of the article verged perilously close to asserted “fact”, and are in error.
Mr. Norström talks about the push in the USA for what he describes as “more responsible gun control”, saying in part:
It took a tragedy for politicians and ordinary people to begin debating stricter gun regulation, a debate long considered the sacred cow of American politics — a topic left aside by all.
There are three key reasons for this:
The first being that the American weapons lobby, led by its main sponsor National Rifle Association, NRA, has a lot of money due to its many members. This enables them to spend huge resources on advertising and influencing politicians. …
The second reason is that pro-weapon spokesmen grossly misinform the general public, again by using the media. They lie to the people about proposed legislation in order to influence a badly read and uninformed public.
The third reason has to do with emotion. Weapons enthusiasts refer to the so-called Second Amendment of the American Constitution, which grants the right to bear arms, and is almost illegal to discuss or question. …
In the US, one is considered unpatriotic if one questions the right to bear arms, in Sweden one is considered a racist if one questions immigration.
The author has no feeling whatsoever for the gun debate in the United States. It’s obvious that he derived all his information ultimately from American MSM sources, and not from ordinary American people.
Take, for example, the notion that the media are manipulated by the NRA to mould public sentiment against gun control. This is so obviously false that all but the most ardent left-wing American progressive would laugh the author into oblivion. The idea that the “gun lobby” controls the argument in the media is ludicrous — the opposite is true!
The media do everything they can to demonize gun owners. Just look at the political cartoons that appeared after the Newtown massacre — at least nineteen out of twenty contrived to make gun owners and the NRA look stupid, violent, racist, evil, cynical, and greedy. Check the cartoon archives on the internet, and you’ll see what I mean.
It’s possible that the NRA and other pro-gun lobbyists “lie to the people about proposed legislation”, but any mendacity on their part is utterly eclipsed by the lies retailed by the supporters of the new laws, including members of Congress and officials in the Obama administration. Their untruths are too numerous to list here, but one might begin by researching the obfuscation around the use of the term “assault weapon” — which turns out to apply to many of the most popular guns that Americans choose to buy.
Then there is the notion that Americans are restrained from voicing their opinions in favor of gun control out of fear that they may be called “unpatriotic”. This is nonsense! The average American simply is patriotic, and is also in favor of the Second Amendment permitting Americans to own and bear arms. He is instinctively resistant to the idea that the government should control his access to firearms.
The sole opinion poll that showed Americans favoring more gun control was contrived, as are most opinion polls, to achieve exactly the result desired.
A more accurate opinion poll is being carried out every day in gun shops and sporting goods stores across the country: people by the millions are choosing to purchase guns. They do this not because they want to murder schoolchildren or gun down shoppers at the mall, but because they do not trust their government, and suspect that it wishes to disarm them in order to impose tyranny.
The truth is this: gun control gains no traction among ordinary Americans because — despite relentless anti-gun propaganda put out by the newspapers and TV — it is not what ordinary Americans want. The NRA is powerful (and well-funded) because it reflects the views of millions of ordinary American citizens, who voluntarily send it their money, and like much of what it does on their behalf. I say this, even though I am not a member myself.
One other thing: To refer to the “so-called Second Amendment” is deeply offensive to the average American. It displays the unthinking, knee-jerk, condescending self-righteousness for which Europeans — especially Scandinavians — are justly famous on this side of the Atlantic. In my work with Europeans over the years, I have grown used to this patronizing treatment of Americans and American culture, but it still saddens me to encounter yet another example of it — and in Dispatch International, of all places!
The Second Amendment forms the bedrock of the American republic. It has been an important and popular part of American culture since the Bill of Rights was first ratified more than two centuries ago. Without it the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of the press and of religion would be no more than a worthless piece of paper, which could be ignored with impunity by any tyrant who happened to gain power.
Those who fail to understand that important fact have no hope of understanding the United States, or the American character.
Dispatch International has earned a justified reputation as a fearless alternative source of information that the mainstream media refuse to publish. It’s a shame that one of your writers was unable to outgrow the version of the United States that the Swedish MSM — relying, of course, on their American counterparts — have been indoctrinating their audience with since at least the 1960s.
There is another America out there — the real America, the one I live in — but you won’t learn about it via the legacy media. In order to perform due diligence, the author needs to research his topic using other sources.
Ya blew one aspect of our history with the gun here in the U, S, of A dear Baron. Posession of a gun by the average Joe was not only nearly universal, but in some colonies (i.e. Massachusetts) (!) mandated by law–and supplied by the authorities if man could not afford one.
This was loooooong before the Revolution was a gleam in a patriot’s eye.
It is a difficult question indeed.. shoud the general population be allowed to bear arms or not? If people have no firearms they will be at the mercy of anyone who does. If all people are allowed to bear arms, everybody will have arms, and crime will turn more violent. Or so they say..
J.Halla-aho recently made a summary of the U.S. weapons politics, using available statistics as his tool. The study was related to heated weapons control discussion that lately have been going on in Finland after some very unfortunate incidents, like random shootings. I’ll translate this essay for you, if you want me to, but the results, that he doesn’t name, may be a bit.. incorrect. Especially in the U.S, or so I’ve come to understand 😛
Let me put it this way; in the Nordic/Scandinavian countries and Europe, gun owners have been made out to be more or less crazy (except the Swiss) and the US and their gun owners are the worst of the worst. I know this because I was the same way once, being brainwashed by politicians and the media in Sweden. After having lived in the US for many years, I know there are two sides of a coin. And the Second Amendment is very important to gun owners. Unfortunately my friends and family in Sweden frown on my change of attitude and no matter how I try to explain, they just don’t get it. That’s how deep the brainwashing has gone in Sweden and Europe.
Europeans in general know little about America and its history, so can’t really judge. Maybe this is why they still love to do it. True, americans have their weak points. But their strong points are all the more impressive, and much could be learned by europeans before starting to criticise this or that. With regards from the eastern shore of the Atlantic.
Amen and rest easy, Baron. Those of us Europeans who do know the real America are not swayed by the rhetoric of the ill informed. We remain cousins by blood , brothers by need and comrades with a common purpose.
Seneca III
Through contact with somebody who until recently lived in the Deep South I have been made aware of what is happening in America. Here in Britain we are fed the anti-gun lobby line by the brainwashing leftist BBC and so most people here would probably take their view. 40 years ago, when America was over 90% white and democratic and we had white hegemony in the world, I might have agreed with them. However, now, as the Daily Mail said after the last presidential election, that we face “The death of white America” as whites who founded and ran the country for close to 500 years approach minority status then I think differently. As the last election showed the future for the States is as an afro-hispanic Central American type communist state led by the present occupant of the White House, whom Pravda has described as a communist, or a look-alike successor. Aware of this and hearing from Russia Today about the burgeoning police state there and the takeover of martial law and drones over Boston I can fully understand why Americans feel the need to stay armed. Unfortunately, as 2040 and white minority time gets close I can see another civil war on the cards as white America fights for survival. Already, I believe, Texas is planning independence. I am no lover of guns but I believe that much of the anti-gun propaganda that reaches us here in Europe has been skewed. And as my friend pointed out, most murders occur in Democrat areas with the toughest gun control.
Hear, hear!!!
An armed man is a citizen, an unarmed man is a subject. Take note my fellow Europeans for you will have need of those implements soon enough and you will despair the day you don’t have one.
Hi Baron,
I am a frequent lurker at GoV but a rare commenter. Your letter is excellent and I am glad you wrote it.
As an FYI for Björn Norström and those who only get their news about the United State’s gun debate from the MSM I would recommend this editorial: Snell: Waking the dragon — How Feinstein fiddled while America burned.
Mr. Norström has a right to believe whatever he wants but those of us who support the Second Amendment have thought through the issues quite well. I am an Endowment member of the NRA so I guess that makes me part of the “weapons lobby.” Somehow I always thought of myself as a law abiding citizen rather than an emotional wreck. I guess you learn something new every day.
Glenn
Mmmm. I remember, in 1960, visiting Nice, France, on a school trip ( I had to save my part-time earnings because my parents couldn’t afford). I was SHOCKED to see that the Gendarmerie were armed and that there were soldiers with machine guns on the streets. (France, even then, had an “Algerian problem”) . At the time the UK had “bobbies on bikes”. No guns, no stab vests.
In the 90s I spent some time working in the “City of London” (the Square Mile). Because of the totally non muslim IRA, supported by American Noraid, pretty well every copper was toting a gun of some kind.
We, in the UK, have not, for long, had the right to bear arms. The Government banned many guns to the extent that sporting “shooters” are now obliged to practice outside the UK. Not a lot of chance of gold medals then.
Result? Well I am prohibited from owning a real gun but gun ownership among criminals increases by the day. Am seriously considering illegally obtaining a gun of high power. Hell I’m old so my time may be limited. I would SO like to exact my version of justice before I expire.
When guns are made illegal, only the criminals have guns. Doesn’t make any sense to me or many with me….
The US second amendment is the only thing stopping the full implementation of the NWO.
Paul Johnson (Historian) once indicated that his sales in Europe were in the hundreds, but his sales in the USA were in the tens of thousands. There are many more people in the USA who self-educate than there are in Europe despite the carefully engineered European conception of the USA.
I would still put my money on the US as the country most likely to slough of the snakeskin of socialism.
It is Sweden (and the rest of Europe) that needs a Tea Party, and also a magnifying glass so that they can look at the crime rates in places where all households have firearms….
Much of the anti-gun propaganda in Europe is focussed on the use of firearms in policing, and the alleged propensity of police in the US to pull guns at the slightest provocation. I do not know the truth of this, but in the 3 months or so that I have spent in the USA, I had no interaction at all with police, a good sign!
Europeans are ‘informed’ by their lifelong diet of Hollywood film.
Consequently, they think the Shootout at the OK Corral was typical in the wild west.
Actually, it was a freakish outlier — which was why it became famous.
The characters of “Unforgiven” are entirely mythic. “Little Bill” — heh.
(In that mythic whorehouse you’ were named after your genitals.)
All of the Dirty Harry flicks — are actually taken as only slightly embellished versions of real life America.
So, they are stuck on myth.
The American reality was that the MORE everyone packed heat — the politer it was.
Europe saw this at Court: any insult could mean a duel at the next dawn. The result was hyper-courtesy: “Your grace… Sir… My lord… Mister… ” right on down the list.
The un-armed have always been disrespected. In it’s extreme form: peasants — treated like chattel.
“Bewick” said, “Well I am prohibited from owning a real gun but gun ownership among criminals increases by the day. ”
The second part of that statement is true, the first isn’t, at the moment. However, as a shooter and owner of several guns (all legal) myself, I am constantly and increasingly wondering, Will we be allowed to keep our guns?
After spending yesterday shooting at Bisley, this question is on my mind.
Heaven knows, the restrictions on gun ownership and use in this country are intrusive enough; every gun is registered, every gun sale must be logged with the police by both the seller and the buyer, getting a Firearms Certificate (FAC) is a long process in the first place, requiring background checks, references, home visits, etc.
The result is the police know the exact whereabouts of every legally held gun in the country and their owners.
This presents two main problems in the face of potential government tyranny and hard-totalitarianism:
First, it is very easy, in principle (the UK is a small country), for the police to confiscate all legally held firearms, thus disarming the population completely and leaving them at the mercy of the state and of criminals (the second part of that has already happened to all intents and purposes).
Second, “When all guns are criminalised, only criminals have guns”; this means two things:
a) The obvious meaning; law-abiding citizens will surrender their weapons to the state, criminals, obviously, will not. This puts law-abiding citizens at a massive disadvantage to criminals.
b) The less obvious meaning; those law-abiding citizens who recognise the tyrannical, totalitarian danger of a state totally disarming its populace and who refuse to surrender their firearms will, automatically, become ‘criminals’ in the eyes of the state and the law enforcement apparatus. And, since the police know exactly who and where they are, they will be persecuted by the state while the ‘invisible’ real criminals are left untouched.
The death toll of the twentieth century (the bloodiest in History, so far) was overwhelmingly a result of Democide, “the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.” A concept recently revived and redefined by the political scientist, R.J. Rummel. Quite simply, government is the most dangerous human institution on Earth and it is most dangerous to its ‘own’ people; according to Rummel, at least two hundred and sixty two million people were killed by their ‘own’ government in the twentieth century.
The U.S. Bill of Rights comes straight out of the English Bill of Rights (1689). Our U.S. cousins have wisely kept their Second Amendment, we have erased ours with illicit government diktat after diktat in the twentieth century. This does not bode well.
As Europe, from Dublin to Warsaw is now in the hands of the EU’s cultural marxist multicultural elite bent on reducing most indigenous Europeans to minorities in their own countries and pressing ahead with the UN’s Agenda 21 to bring millions more third world masses into Europe, there seems little hope as we are without arms and thereby virtually toothless. As Europe ceases to be ethnically European by the day and Europeans are overtaken by the masses from the Southern Hemisphere, we only have a clutch of smallish nationalist parties tasked with carrying out the anti-Marxist counter-revolution.
Here in Europe we love our own people, our own culture, our own Christian civilisation and do not want them to be extinguished so we can either look east to a Russia which is post-Marxist, rechristianised and anti-islamic – I am hoping that Putin will give Cameron a flea in his ear at Sochi about the way islamic terrorists come to Britain for their training – or West where there are still whites who wish to preserve the Anglo-saxon heritage and to fight the battle against the New World Order’s plans for white genocide. We are depending on America to put up a fight on our behalf as Britain and many other European countries are all but lost. Please do not let us down.
Just as a matter of fact, I don’t think Europe has many immigrants from the Southern Hemisphere. In any event, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, and most of Somalia are all in the Northern.
Björn Norström typifies a certain kind of European statist snob, who – never having experienced real liberty and thus having little idea of how it is to be safeguarded – mindlessly criticizes those whose way of life he cannot possibly understand, all the while maintaining that smug, superior attitude for which the Euro-elite are famous.
Perhaps Mr. Norström would benefit from a history lesson. Within living memory, the Anglo-America powers stormed ashore at Normandy to free a continent. They were heavily-armed, and needed to be. What did he expect those soldiers to use against Hitler’s Waffen-SS fanatics – harsh language? His fellow Scandinavians in Norway and Denmark were conquered by the Nazis, and thereby had to resist by whatever means they could. Those means included the use of small arms, otherwise known as guns. Again, what does he think the Danish and Norwegian resistance should have used, if not firearms?
Then again, perhaps I am being unfair; Mr. Norström is only doing what Swedes seem prone to do – take the path of least-resistance, rather than doing what is right. During the war, his home nation of Sweden was too busy collaborating with the Germans, and raking in the kronor selling iron ore to the regime in Berlin – to take an active part in the Allied war effort.
Rather than spending his time berating Americans, who remain free today in part because of the Second Amendment and their right to bear arms, perhaps Norström ought to worry about those roving gangs of Islamic youths terrorizing Swedish cities and raping Swedish women – while Swedish men look on, impotently. He could buy a gun to protect himself and his own, but pardon me… I forget that a Swede would never do something so barbaric.
In closing, Mr. Norström, let me make a friendly reminder to you: you’d best learn to protect your nation against the hordes of Muslims you are letting into your homeland, because they certainly won’t have any qualms about the use of force to get what they want. Say what one will about Muslims, they do respect the strong horse. In any event, don’t even think of asking for American help if you get into trouble. It won’t be coming. You are on your own.
You are seriously underestimating the Swedish technical and economic support for the Nazi regime.
1) 88mm triple purpose (anti-aircraft, anti-tank, anti-ship) high velocity gun was co-designed and ORIGINALLY fabricated in Sweden — to get around the Treaty. The very last installation of this famous beast was in Finland — removed in 1968 — parts supplied by Sweden — of course.
2) Ball bearings — the very, very, very, best: the critical ones used inside Nazi aero-engines, tank engines and U-boats.
In a tale suitable for as a war adventure film, the British had to buy out — with American gold — the Swedish ball bearing production oriented towards Nazi Germany — which stunt was performed during 1943 to coincide with the Schweinfurt raid.
http://www.secondworldwarhistory.com/schweinfurt-raids.asp
The leader of this British economic warfare operation was, uniquely, knighted anonymously by the King at the height of the war.
Speer later recounted that this period was so disruptive that he thought that the war was going to be lost right then and there. Working in total panic mode, the Germans redesigned ball bearings out of their equipment whenever possible. This was the primary reason for the hyper-priority placed upon assault guns as against turreted tanks — which used a lot of expensive bearings to mount the turret.
3) Rather than just ‘iron ore’ the Swedes were exporting the critical ores required for super strength steels — used in U-boats. The Nazis weren’t hurting for iron, per se; nickel and moly were the issue. Since most historians are not technically aware — they write this dependency up as being upon ‘iron ore.’ Hitler had no work around for this dependecy.
4) It’s the fantastic super war profit on the never used Nazi bearings — paid for in gold — that made the insanity of Swedish socialism affordable for decades. Like their buddies in Switzerland, they made war bucks so vast and so dirty that they must be hidden from historians — even as they generate a massive guilt complex for those at the top. (Raoul Wallenberg was the White Sheep of the family. — Everyone else was seeped in filthy war profiteering — selling to both Britain and Germany at astounding gross margins critical war goods.
5) Of that last item — the Merlin engine used Swedish ball bearings — particularly in the early models. Fully 40% of British aero-engine production turned on the availability of these bearings. (SKF) To obtain them ‘high speed’ patrol boats were used to run the gauntlet from Sweden to Britain. They ran in the worst weather — to avoid detection. This fantastic operation is still not widely known. It’s both heroic — and nationally embarrassing — all the way around.
So now you know how the Swedes could finance socialism — and where their perpetual guilt WRT political refugees comes from.
BTW, the Wallenberg family pretty much owns and runs Sweden. It’s not that big of a country — and they got in — like J.P. Morgan — on the cheap — financing companies in tight spots. Again, like Morgan, they don’t like the limelight. This gives outsiders the illusion that this or that Swedish company is not affiliated — when they’re all under the same ultimate ownership.
As ever, Socialism is okay for the aristocracy — it’s policies stop a rising of the middle class, instead. ( It’s impossible to accumulate capital. — which stops ugly competition against those who’ve already attained the top.)
Re: “You are seriously underestimating the Swedish technical and economic support for the Nazi regime.” Blert, who said anything about “underestimating” the collaboration of the Swedes with Berlin during the war? Believe me, I do not. I have family in another Scandinavian country – and know full-well the extent of Sweden’s activities, shall we say, during the war. I merely did not wish to list all of the many examples… but then, you saved me the trouble with your very well-done list, for which you have my thanks…
I had not known all this. Many thanks.