“All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The Communist Party must command all the guns; that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party.”
The quote was from Mao Zedong, founder of Communist China. Mao’s first act after gaining complete control of China in 1949 was to take away all guns from the population. It was a policy he began in 1935 as he took over each rural province. Anyone found with a gun post-confiscation was executed.
An estimated 65 million Chinese died as a result of Mao’s repeated, merciless attempts to create a new “socialist” China. Anyone who got in his way was done away with—by execution, imprisonment, or forced famine.
Mao killed more people than either Stalin or Hitler during World War II. And it all began after he took away the guns.
Dictators throughout much of history have disarmed their populations before they began their mass killings. Examples abound beyond Mao: Hitler took guns from the Jews in November of 1938, and Kristallnacht and the Holocaust followed; and then there was Fidel Castro in Cuba and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, to name but a few.