I tend to think that these kinds of summaries kinda miss the point. Yes, it&#x27;s technically true that if the oppressed Jews had a lot more guns, they might have lasted longer, or took more Germans with them, or survived the war or something. But the real issue is more the mindset and culture they had than the weapons and the laws around them.<p>First, it bears repeating that the vast majority of Jews killed were Polish, not German. This never really was a matter of not paying attention to the political progress of anti-semitism in your own country, but rather that your crazy neighbors get crazier and crazier and eventually invade your country and turn it upside-down.<p>The real problem is that the Polish Jews always had to deal with a relatively low-level anti-semitism, and their strategy of being meek and going along always worked well enough for them. They had been doing it for so long that even when the Nazis invaded and changed everything virtually overnight, there was no real widespread movement for resistance until it was much too late. If it had been legal for them to buy and own guns, they wouldn&#x27;t have bothered, and if they had them, they would have given them up without a peep long before.<p>I suppose you could say that the even deeper root of the problem is the belief that It Can&#x27;t Happen Here. The Nazis did indeed try hard to hide the facts of what they were doing, but they were greatly helped by the fact that pretty much nobody really believed that such industrialized mass-murder could happen in a first-world, civilized country. Even with the massive levels of documentation produced, there are plenty of people who still don&#x27;t believe that it happened.<p>But the facts on the ground there went on to fuel history in another direction. Jewish shame at how passively they were led to the slaughter in Europe fueled their will to flout British colonial immigration laws in moving to what was then British Palestine, found a nation and an army, desperately build or buy weapons from any possible source, and successfully defend it against all comers over and over again. They were also helped in no small part by Western diplomatic backing, fueled by shame at not having done enough to prevent the Holocaust from happening.<p>In the end, having the materiel and skills to defend yourself is good, but having the knowledge that you might need to and the will to go through with it is more important. Without that, any armaments you do have will evaporate before they can make a difference, and with it, you can find a way to buy or make some kind of weapons, even if it wouldn&#x27;t be as good as if you had gotten them beforehand.