Or was it so extraordinary?

America’s gun fantasists have poisoned public debate over guns’ role in a civilized society with plenty of chest thumping about their  importance in overthrowing tyranny. And while their definition of tyranny is a strange mix of paranoid fantasy with simply having their candidate lose, there is some truth to it.  But remarkably little.

Egyptians overthrew Mubarak without significant violence by protestors. But Russians also overthrew their communist regime with little violence.  The East Germans did the same.  The Hungarians the same.  The Poles the same. The Bulgarians the same,  The Czechs the same.  In almost every case the overthrow occurred with almost no armed rebellion.  Only ending Communist rule in Romania involved significant violence. In all these cases the regimes lost the loyalty of the armed forces, which when push came to shove, refused to fire on their fellow countrymen and women.  And the revolutionaries for their part refrained from significant violence.

My point is not that violence is never necessary.  But for overthrowing home-grown tyrants, it is overrated as a necessary tool.  When the troops remain loyal, as at Tiananmen Square in China, even the most sophisticated civilian weapons are next to useless for overthrowing the oppressor, so great is modern military firepower.  China’s tyrants played it safe, and the troops spoke dialects of Chinese mutually unintelligible to the demonstrators.

In resisting foreign invaders weapons are usually more needed, as with Vietnam, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and the American government’s current invasion of the same. (Although even here India suggests other possibilities when the invaders are not complete barbarians.)  But for homegrown tyrants, when the uprising is essentially popular, during our time weapons have been remarkably irrelevant.  Fortunately, for violence is at best chemotherapy for a society which hopefully will kill the disease before it kills the patient.

The gun nuts will ignore these facts because wearing a gun when others around them are unarmed and no one is shooting at them makes them feel like ‘real men.’  Sorta like their hero John Wayne, who alone of his generation of major Hollywood actors, never served and relied on draft exemptions to stay at home dating starlets, while wearing guns in pretend battles where he never risked a hair on his head. For them he is the epitome of “manliness.”

For me, the Egyptians who stood unarmed and defiant in Tharir Square are a far better example of true courage by men and women alike.