What an odd opinion piece. It seems to suggest that the Jews of Nazi occupied countries were merely missing arms in order to significantly deter the Wehrmacht that was taking on the combined forces of the Soviet, British, and US military.

Yet it doesn't explain why the French people in Nazi occupied countries, who had a larger gun culture, were so (relatively) easily subdued and kept pacified.

If the thesis is correct, it would seem to suggest that the two-state solution might be achieved by simply delivering massive amounts of arms to the Palestinians. But I can't help in reading it that it's an advocacy piece supporting a certain US view towards the right to bear arms, and subject to 'hypothesis myopia', where 'investigators fixate on collecting evidence to support just one hypothesis; neglect to look for evidence against it; and fail to consider other explanations.' (Quoting http://www.nature.com/news/how-scientists-fool-themselves-an... .)

As evidence of one thing I think is odd, I'll note that the quote from the 1967 "International Society for the Prevention of Crime", which concluded "defensive measures are the most effective means for the prevention of genocide" only appears in a handful of web search results, many by the same author as this, and the others from US sources which appear to want minimal gun controls.

That's hardly suggestive of a wide-spread agreement that that view is correct.

I attempted to verify the quote, to learn the context, but found very little even about the organization/meeting. DDG at https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22International+Society+for+the+P... only finds 6 matches, including this WaPo opinion piece. Ditto for Google. Only one is not derived from this opinion piece, that being the author's earlier paper at https://www.saf.org/journal/19/kopel.pdf .

That paper in turn references 'V.V. Stanciu, “Reflections on the Congress for the Prevention of Genocide,” in Yad Vashem Studies on the European Jewish Catastrophe and Resistance, vol. 7, ed., Livia Rothkirchen (Jerusalem, Israel: Yad Vashem, 1968), p. 187'. The only other paper I found which cites that reference is David Caplan, in "Weapons Control Laws: Gateways to Victim Oppression and Genocide", at http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4899-5974-4_1... , which also appears to argue for weak gun controls.

(I verified that the cited source does exist; see http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/about/institute/studies/issue... . Stanciu appears to have been a French lawyer and criminologist.)

Using a reference from 1967 from what appears to be an obscure source make me think it's a result of quote mining. Is this view an outlier specifically chose to back a predetermined hypothesis? Why reference something that's older than I am - is there really nothing newer?

Given the number of genocides since 1967 (Rwanda, Red Terror in Ethiopia, Cambodian Genocide, 1971 Bangladesh atrocities, and the Nigerian Civil War all seem ways to test that thesis), surely those would provide additional insight the relationship between strong gun control laws and genocide. Could we have prevented the genocide in Rwanda by air-dropping a bunch of arms on those being killed?

Indeed, I found just such a paper when trying to find out more about Stanciu. This paper is "Rethinking Approaches to Prevention under the Responsibility to Protect Agency and Empowerment within Vulnerable Populations" at
at http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/10.... .

> The paper considers a number of historical case studies in which targeted groups were able to leverage their own agency, often with assistance from others, to reduce this vulnerability. These include cases that culminated in genocide, namely the experiences of German and Austrian Jews under Nazi rule, and negative cases studies in which a demonstrable risk of mass atrocities was not realised, such as the experiences of Yemenite Jews in the first half of the twentieth century and those of the Bahá’í community in Iran since the 1979 Iranian revolution. These cases suggest that assisting persecuted populations to empower themselves can be an effective way to promote resilience to mass atrocities.

and the author of that piece has done a lot of research on genocide http://ro.uow.edu.au/do/search/?q=author_lname%3A%22Mayersen... .