Tag Archives: David Kopel

Attic Find: MP40

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Construction workers in Eastern Europe recently stumbled across a vintage SMG left over from World War II. 

The Lesser Poland (Małopolska) regional headquarters of the country’s Policja, or national police force, last month posted images of a recovered German-made MP40 sub gun, complete with its 30-round magazine and packets of tarnished 9mm ammunition. 

According to the post, the WWII-era maschinenpistole was made in 1941 and had been recovered by workers in the historic Old Town tenements in the southeastern Polish city of Tarnow. Workers found the MP40 first, wrapped in rags, while dismantling a wooden roof, then the bullets, hidden in the rafters. 

Tarnow, which had been part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire after the 1772 partition of Poland, became part of the reunified Polish nation in 1918. It was occupied by the Germans during WWII in 1939, then by the Soviets in 1945. During the occupation, members of the city’s Jewish population– almost all of which were deported to extermination camps at Auschwitz and Belzec– mounted an armed underground resistance to the Germans. 

“Contrary to myth of Jewish passivity, many Jews did fight back during the Holocaust,” notes 2A scholar and attorney David Kopel in his work on armed resistance to genocide. “They shut down the extermination camp at Sobibor, rose up in the Warsaw Ghetto, and fought in the woods and swamps all over Eastern Europe. Indeed, Jews resisted at a higher rate than did any other population under Nazi rule. The experience of the Holocaust shows why Jews, and all people of good will, should support the right of potential genocide victims to possess defensive arms, and refutes the notion that violence is necessarily immoral.”

The Policja stated the recovered MP40 will be either donated to a museum to be preserved or destroyed. We are hoping for the former.

Advice from the Killing Fields

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Since 2012, I have written about 3,200 articles for Guns.com (sheesh!), most of which I chose not to share here as they are generally on gun law and politics such as on-going legislation and litigation and that gets not only tedious but also divisive. Every now and then I will do an opinion piece for them when something really gets me ready to eat my hat.

And I did one a couple weeks ago in open response to a VOA article which offered some wisdom by Chheang Vannarith, chair of the advisory board of the Cambodia Institute for Strategic Studies, about how Cambodian gun laws are so much better than those in the U.S., and how we could fix gun violence here :

“First is gun management. Second is pushing back on extremist trends, and discrimination in American society,” Vannarith said.

The solution to gun management is the most straightforward, he said.

If federal governments or state governments in the US cannot manage gun ownership effectively, then people should not be allowed to carry guns.

“The new US government should endorse a high standard of gun law and should not allow the people to buy or stock guns at home or carry with themselves,” he said.

My take on that, and what is probably the biggest instance of the pot calling the kettle black in recent months, is here should you want to partake.