"After the conquest of France in 1940, the Germans made intensive efforts to remove guns from French civilians. French civilians took great risks to keep their guns. Secret caches of firearms provided weapons for guerilla bands in the last months of the occupation. They also bolstered the confidence and spirit of a wider range of resisters. Stephen Halbrook''s Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France tells this story in vivid detail, drawing on official documents of that era and a range of post-war reminiscences." --Jeremy A. Rabkin, Professor of Law, Antonin Scalia Law School, George Mason University " Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France makes evident several inescapable conclusions: first, a disarmed populace is a priority for tyrants; second, disarming a populace is an achievable bureaucratic process done with relative ease over a short span of time; third, once disarmed the populace must choose either submission to tyranny or death; fourth, the natural right to self-preservation is inextricably tied to the natural right to keep and bear arms; and fifth, effective resistance to tyranny does not start at the knock at the door, but at the politicians'' call for gun registration. There was a time when most Americans understood these unpleasant truisms.

Stephen Halbrook''s timely book is an urgent reminder." --Marshall L. DeRosa, Professor of Political Science, Florida Atlantic University; author, The Ninth Amendment and the Politics of Creative Jurisprudence and The Politics of Dissolution and the Rhetorical Quest for a National Identity "Stephen P. Halbrook''s, Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France , will be received with the same controversy as his previous work, Gun Control in the Third Reich . Gun control advocates will hate it and gun ownership supporters will love it. Irrespective of what side of the gun control debate you are on, you should read it. It is meticulously research, but that will not deter critics from saying that an example from occupied France is as irrelevant as that of the Third Reich. But is it? The venerated sociologist Max Weber instructed us to look at the ''extreme case'' as a way of understanding social reality, and Halbrook does precisely that.

In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting, do you want to seize guns? Well, even on pain of facing a firing squad, gun owners in Nazi-occupied France largely held on to their weapons. Seizing weapons is not as accessible a social policy as one might assume. An armed populace in Nazi-occupied France formed the foundation for the resistance to the brutality of the occupation. While the resistance could not overthrow the Nazi regime, it undermined it and was able to join the allied invasion force in pushing the Nazis out of France. Critics of Halbrook''s earlier work have stated that since Jews were less than 1% of the population of Germany when the Nazis took over, what good would their armed resistance have been? This critique ignores the triumph of the human spirit in its desire to resist oppression, to make the oppression burdensome and odious. In his Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn argued for resisting the heavily-armed state organs with clubs in the absence of guns because resistance is important. Some of those who seek to join the oppressors will be deterred by the prospect of their own deaths. At a time when the debate over gun control is front and center on the political stage, Halbrook''s meticulously researched work on Nazi-occupied France is a welcome contribution to that debate, and one that cannot be easily dismissed.

" --Abraham H. Miller, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Cincinnati; Distinguished Fellow, Haym Salomon Center "The sophisticated analysis in Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France shows how Nazi gun control enforcement was affected by military events, international law, civilian cooperation, and the special situation of the nominally independent Vichy government. Halbrook demonstrates how gun registration laws enacted by a democratic government may later be exploited by a tyranny--with registration leading to confiscation and then to mass murder." --David B. Kopel, Adjunct Professor of Advanced Constitutional Law, Sturm College of Law, University of Denver; author, Guns: Who Should Have Them? ; Research Director, Independence Institute.