The urge to self-preservation may not be entirely dead among native Europeans. According to European news sources, cited in this article at WND, Europeans who have the realistic option of purchasing firearms have started doing so, at a dramatically increased rate.
Although the citizens of several key countries (e.g., Germany, the Netherlands) are basically prohibited from buying guns — by the very high obstacles their governments set for such purchases — those who can are flocking to gun vendors. Women are reportedly the customer base showing the biggest increase.
Austria is one of the nations where guns are selling fast.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
A Czech TV report confirms that long guns – shotguns and rifles – have been flying off the shelves in Austria, and Austrians who haven’t already purchased a gun may not have a chance to get one for some time. They’re all sold out.
And those arming themselves are primarily women.
“If anyone wants to buy a long gun in Austria right now, too bad for them,” the Czech newscaster says. “All of them are currently sold out.”
He cites the Austrian news outlet Trioler Tageszeitung as the source of his report.
“We cannot complain about lack of demand,” Stephen Mayer, a gun merchant, told Trioler Tageszeitung.
He claims the stock has been sold out for the last three weeks and that demand is being fueled by fears generated by social changes.
(See the video clip at the WND link, with subtitles, from the Czech TV report.)
Alan Gottlieb, familiar to many Americans as a Second Amendment activist, says he has seen a shift in European attitudes about gun rights — clearly a shift linked to the influx of migrants, some of whom have been issuing threats, attacking local women, and creating incidents of mass violence in the camps where they are housed. (Europeans didn’t miss it either, when police disclosed that they themselves are outgunned by the jihadi extremists in the immigrant population.) According to Gottlieb:
“I just returned from a gun rights meeting in Belgium, and I can attest that all over Europe people now want the means to defend themselves,” Gottlieb told WND. “Self-defense is no longer a dirty word. In countries like Austria, where it is still legal to own a firearm, gun sales are at record levels. I can tell you first-hand that people in Europe now wish they had a Second Amendment.”
WND’s reporter, Leo Hohmann, points out that members of the traditional “elite” disparage this trend:
[In the Czech TV report, a] Viennese sociologist, identified only as Mr. Gertler, said no such fears about migrants should ever be published by any Austrian news outlet.
A journalist named Wittinger said “something is very wrong here” if Austrians are buying guns to protect themselves against migrants.
“Shotguns will not, after all, solve any immediate problems, quite the contrary,” he said.
But Europeans are already figuring out that this cop-out attitude means problems will be “solved” — by means of Europeans losing their basic freedoms. Anne-Marie Waters, writing at Breitbart London (link above), summarizes it thus:
In response to the rape epidemic, European authorities have decided to follow the Islamic way entirely; they’ve decided to place restrictions on the freedoms of their own women, rather than the freedoms of known rapists. In Germany, women were advised not to travel to and from the train station unaccompanied.
So there you have it, the removal of a woman’s most basic freedom – the freedom to go about her business in safety – is the German authorities’ solution to rape. Young girls have been told not to wear shorts in another German town, because this might lead to misunderstandings (“misunderstanding” is Newspeak for rape in progressive modern Germany).
So it is the girls who have their freedoms removed, and the emphasis is placed on their behaviour, while rapists are permitted to run free. This is only the start. Will girls be prevented from playing sports to avoid “misunderstandings”? Just how much freedom are our leaders going to give away to appease Muslim men? We’ve already handed over free speech, now it’s time to hand over women’s freedom.
Those who can do so are arming up to make themselves harder targets. We shouldn’t be surprised, of course. The need for this move has been evident for a while now. I wrote about it in January, right after the guerrilla terrorist attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the Paris kosher market, which marked a new turn in the direction of jihadi methods in the West. One of the things I pointed out then is that this problem is simply too big for the normal scope of law enforcement:
What people need to understand is that this is too big for the police to handle. That’s why the French police have not been “in charge,” in the way we are accustomed to, at any point in this drama. They keep being surprised and rear-ended…
The option of making the police bigger, giving them more weaponry and more arbitrary power, increasing the surveillance of the entire population in order to discover these plots beforehand, is a non-starter.
A free people cannot live that way. And if we are not a free people, then there is no point in the borders and constitutions we have now. The value of everything is up for grabs.
The people themselves will have to change. It’s been a long time since Europeans went about armed, but Americans do it every day — with many people completely unaware of all the guns in holsters and purses around them. The point is not to start fights, but to prevent them, by establishing that a populace is too hard a target for physical intimidation and the sowing of chaos.
This was my argument in January:
A third Western thing we must do is reclaim the very Western concept of the armed citizen. Running in fear from that concept is an excellent example of a modernism that is not Western. From the earliest days of the ancient Greek hoplite – the citizen-soldier – the uniquely Western idea of human equality and man’s relationship to the state has been linked intrinsically with the yeomanry bearing arms on its own say-so.
All deviations from that, in the West of the last 2,500 years, have arisen from central governments hoping to impose forms of inequality on the people: some people armed and favored, some disarmed and subjugated.
But that doesn’t mean that Western life should revolve around armed confrontations and shoot-outs. The truth is that when there is a pervasive ethic of responsible armament, it doesn’t. We shouldn’t want or accept a future full of bloody shoot-outs with terrorists, but in the United States, certainly, history shows that’s not what we’ll have with an armed, alerted society.
Europeans revisiting the option of being armed is inevitable, as a threat to their social peace bursts forth in their midst. It remains to be seen whether Europe can turn this trend into a recovery of civilizational confidence and vision on a larger scale. It will take more than being armed. But being armed — and valuing the worth of individuals, in the manner implicit with responsible armament and self-defense — is part of it. Europe won’t get much help from America before January 2017, but it’s an encouraging sign that some Europeans are starting to think for themselves.
