According to Fox News:

Venezuelans regret gun ban, ‘a declaration of war against an unarmed population’

As Venezuela continues to crumble under the socialist dictatorship of President Nicolas Maduro, some are expressing words of warning – and resentment – against a six-year-old gun control bill that stripped citizens of their weapons.

“Guns would have served as a vital pillar to remaining a free people, or at least able to put up a fight,” Javier Vanegas, 28, a Venezuelan teacher of English now exiled in Ecuador, told Fox News. “The government security forces, at the beginning of this debacle, knew they had no real opposition to their force. Once things were this bad, it was a clear declaration of war against an unarmed population.”

That is pretty much the hallmark of a tyrannical dictatorship.

Under the direction of then-President Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan National Assembly in 2012 enacted the “Control of Arms, Munitions and Disarmament Law,” with the explicit aim to “disarm all citizens.” The law took effect in 2013, with only minimal pushback from some pro-democracy opposition figures, banned the legal commercial sale of guns and munitions to all – except government entities.

That sounds a lot like what we hear out of California and New York.

Chavez initially ran a months-long amnesty program encouraging Venezuelans to trade their arms for electrical goods. That year, there were only 37 recorded voluntary gun surrenders, while the majority of seizures – more than 12,500 – were by force.

The first parts sounds like every buyback or surrender program ever implemented in the US.  Gun owners in both American hemispheres don’t want to give up their guns in exchange for trinkets.

The latter part sounds like what every anti-gunner threatens us with, to take our guns from our cold dead hands.  Or just to nuke us.

In 2014, with Nicolás Maduro at the helm following Chavez’s death but carrying through his socialist “Chavista” policies, the government invested more than $47 million enforcing the gun ban – which has since included grandiose displays of public weapons demolitions in the town square.

The people are starving, they are eating rats and zoo animals, there are rolling blackouts across the country, but the government is spending $47 million on anti-gun enforcement.  This is socialism.  Let the people starve, the government needs to assure its power.

Prior to the 2012 reform, there were only around eight gun stores in the entire country. And the process of obtaining a legal permit to own and carry was plagued by long wait lines, high costs and bribery “to make the process swifter” at the one department allowed to issue licenses, which operated under the umbrella of the Ministry of Defense.

Damn, that sounds a lot like New York City.

“Venezuelans didn’t care enough about it. The idea of having the means to protect your home was seen as only needed out in the fields. People never would have believed they needed to defend themselves against the government,” Vanegas explained. “Venezuelans evolved to always hope that our government would be non-tyrannical, non-violator of human rights, and would always have a good enough control of criminality.”

I’m going to post that one more time, in bold.

“Venezuelans didn’t care enough about it. The idea of having the means to protect your home was seen as only needed out in the fields. People never would have believed they needed to defend themselves against the government,” Vanegas explained. “Venezuelans evolved to always hope that our government would be non-tyrannical, non-violator of human rights, and would always have a good enough control of criminality.”

Dear Americans, do you think that the new wave of American Democrat Socialist are any different than Chavez or Maduro?  Do you think that they would act any differently if they were in power.

OR…

If you really believe Trump is going to set up concentration camps to electrocute the gays and gas the DREAMers, don’t you want to protect yourself from his thugs?

He said it didn’t take long for such a wide-eyed public perception to fall apart. “If guns had been a stronger part of our culture, if there had been a sense of duty for one to protect their individual rights, and as a show of force against a government power – and had legal carry been a common thing – it would have made a huge difference,” he lamented.

Welcome to the Red State mentality.

Since April 2017, almost 200 pro-democracy protesters in Venezuela – armed mostly with stones – were shot dead by government forces in brutal retaliation to their call to end the oppressive socialist regime. The once oil-wealthy nation has continued its downward spiral into financial ruin, extreme violence, and mass human rights violations. An estimated three million Venezuelans have been forced to flee since 2015.

Unarmed civilians vs. a dictators armed thugs.  How many times have we seen something similar to that before?  The 20th century records a death toll of 100 million people from that across the world’s socialist nations.

“Venezuela shows the deadly peril when citizens are deprived of the means of resisting the depredations of a criminal government,” said David Kopel, a policy analyst, and research director at the Independence Institute and adjunct professor of Advanced Constitutional Law at Denver University. “The Venezuelan rulers – like their Cuban masters – apparently viewed citizen possession of arms as a potential danger to a permanent communist monopoly of power.”

Once more, again, in bold.

“Venezuela shows the deadly peril when citizens are deprived of the means of resisting the depredations of a criminal government,” said David Kopel, a policy analyst, and research director at the Independence Institute and adjunct professor of Advanced Constitutional Law at Denver University. “The Venezuelan rulers – like their Cuban masters – apparently viewed citizen possession of arms as a potential danger to a permanent communist monopoly of power.”

Armed defense against tyranny isn’t some fantasy pipe dream.  The lack of it was clearly a factor in the destruction of quality of life in Cuba and Venezuela.

Although the bill was sold to the population as a hardline effort to improve security, and sharply reduce crime, many now point to Venezuela as a case study for how gun prohibition can actually produce the opposite effect.

The violent crime rate, already high, soared. Almost 28,000 people were murdered in 2015 – with the homicide rate becoming the world’s highest. Compare that, according to GunPolicy.org – an international firearms prevention and policy research initiative – to just under 10,000 in 2012, and 6,500 thousand in 2001, the year before Chavez came to power.

The total number of gun deaths in 2013 was estimated to 14,622, having steadily risen from 10,913 in 2002. While comprehensive data now goes unrecorded by the government, in September this year, Amnesty International declared Venezuela had a murder rate “worse than some war zones” – 89 people per 100,000 people – and three times that of its volatile neighbor Brazil.

Again, we’ve seen exactly that same trend in the United States.  Gun control only drives an increase in crime in high crime areas.

Much of the crime has been attributed by analysts to government-backed gangs – referred to in Spanish as “collectivos” – who were deliberately put in place by the government.

“They were set up by the government to act as proxies and exert community control. They’re the guys on the motorcycles in the poor neighborhoods, who killed any protesters,” said Vanessa Neumann, the Venezuelan-American president and founder of Asymmetrica, a Washington, D.C.-based political risk research and consulting firm. “The gun reform policy of the government was about social control. As the citizenry got more desperate and hungry and angry with the political situation, they did not want them to be able to defend themselves. It was not about security; it was about a monopoly on violence and social control.”

Brownshirts, Blackshirts, Collectivios, socialist governments have always had thugs to beat the people in submission.

Right now the only difference between here and the US is that Antifa is not on the Democrat payroll.  If they were, which would guarantee them greater protection, you know they would be killing people, not just injuring them.

So while Venezuelan citizens were stripped of their legal recourse to bear arms, the “collectivos” – established by Chavez when came to power – were legally locked and loaded. Deemed crucial to the survival of the socialist dictatorship, the “collectivos” function to brutally subjugate opposition groups, while saving some face as they aren’t officially government forces, critics contend.

“Everyone else but the common citizen. This law asks for the disarming of the common people, but everyone else can carry,” Espinel said. “The kind of law might make sense in a normal country, but in Venezuela, it makes no sense. People are faced with crime and have no easy means to defend themselves.”

So close…. the law is what turns normal countries into Venezuela.

“The people of Venezuela should have rights for gun carrying because there is just too much crime and people should have the right to defend themselves because the justice system is not working,” Arias asserted. “If you call the police, the police come only if they want. If they capture the criminal maybe they will take away whatever they stole, but they normally go free again. It’s a vicious cycle.”

That new Soft on Crime bill is going to be AWESOME for increasing the safety of the people of Suffolk County, MA.

Luis Farias, 48, from Margarita, said that gun violence was indeed bad when guns were freely available for purchase. But it became much worse after the gun ban was passed. “Now the criminal mother is unleashed,” Farias said. “Trying to ban guns didn’t take guns off the streets. Nobody cares about the law; the criminals don’t care about the law.”

Hoe many times am I going to do this in this post?

Luis Farias, 48, from Margarita, said that gun violence was indeed bad when guns were freely available for purchase. But it became much worse after the gun ban was passed. “Now the criminal mother is unleashed,” Farias said. “Trying to ban guns didn’t take guns off the streets. Nobody cares about the law; the criminals don’t care about the law.”

It’s like Venezuelans are starting to figure out what American gun right’s advocates have been saying for decades.

Venezuela was a wealthy, oil rich, successful nation.  Add socialism and gun control and it is one of the poorest and most violent nations in the western hemisphere.

Does anybody really believe that deep down Americans and Venezuelan are so different that if socialism and gun control  were implemented here, the results would be utopia instead of starvation and criminals gangs roaming the streets like a scene from a George Miller movie?

I don’t.

I think the difference between the US and Venezuela is that we have a greater percentage of the population that knows that economic and political liberty – including gun rights – are what keeps America from turning into Venezuela.

American exceptionalism is largely in the soul of those to embrace the promise of the Constituion.

Socialists are the same everywhere, they implement the same policies everywhere, and everywhere they do, the result is the same: oppression, starvation, and death.