Mass murder and the unarmed citizen

From Howard Nemerov, on the slaughter of unarmed populations:

... Here is a partial list of countries that, in the 20th century, carried out government-sponsored mass murder, termed “democide” by Professor Rudy Rummel: People’s Republic of China (76.7 million murdered); Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (61.9 million); and Nazi Germany (21 million). Other countries listed by Professor Rummel include: Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, and Yugoslavia, et al, resulting in another 13 million murdered by their own governments. Other homicidal countries included Imperial Japan (World War II) and Turkey (1.9 million), who murdered mostly ‘others’ in the name of racial purity and territorial conquest. All told, Rummel estimates that 262 million people were slaughtered by homicidal governments during the 20th Century alone. These numbers are beyond comprehension, as Professor Rummel explains:

But, who can digest a total of 1,000,000 or more murdered. It is near impossible to empathize with the human catastrophe such statistics dimly reflect when we have difficulty getting a feel for numbers greater than six or seven. A murderer tortures and kills three people, and that gets into our gut – three loving, feeling, human beings killed in agony. We can imagine this happening to our family or circle of close friends. But mention 10,000, 100,000, or 1,000,000, and that is beyond imagination and feeling; they are only numbers.

Here is a practical and relevant way to put this in perspective: Between 2001 and 2007, American criminals murdered an average of 16,520 victims per year. This means that it would take 15,860 years for criminal murderers to accomplish what was accomplished in decades by a few insane government leaders.
Here’s the last piece in the puzzle: None of these homicidal governments had any constitutional document providing for civilian firearms ownership. In most cases, any laws on the books allowing civilian gun ownership, at the time the dictator took over, were quickly removed. ...

Article here. History shows that mass murder on such a scale is only possible against an unarmed population. Governments are very efficient murderers of their own citizenry.

Free speech, so exalted by clueless intellectuals (and I use that term loosely) is both ineffective and easily silenced by tyrannical governments -- the government simply rounds up the noisiest and murders them. The message is unmistakable, powerful, and effective: talk against the government and you and your families will die. A heavily armed populace willing to fight back is the only true defense against such tyranny.