Democide: Understanding the State’s Monopoly on Violence and the Second Amendment

Gun control is predicated on the belief that private citizens cannot be trusted with firearms. That the state should have a "monopoly on violence" because it is less violent than individuals. And that firearms should be taken away from private citizens because only the state is responsible enough to handle them.

There is, however, a major problem with this: States are statistically far more violent than individuals. After all, in the 20th century alone, 262 MILLION people died at the hands of their own governments.

The term for this sort of atrocity is “democide.” It is one of the reasons the Founding Fathers included the Second Amendment in the U.S. Constitution – toallow citizens some form of protection against agents of a tyrannical government meaning to do them harm, as the Founders were forcibly disarmed as colonists by the British prior to the American Revolution.
What Is Democide?

Democide is the murder of any person or people by their government. It’s an important concept, as it is more expansive than the better-known term genocide. While the largest genocide in history is widely thought to be the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler’s work pales in comparison to that of Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong. In fact, one aspect of Stalin’s terror was the “Holodomor,” the intentional mass starvation of Ukrainians, which killed over seven million victims in less than two years (compared to six million Jews over the four years of the Holocaust).

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