David Hogg is a high-profile gun control activist who became one after being present at the 2018 Stoneman High School shooting in Florida. Whatever one’s position on the Second Amendment, it is difficult for us to imagine surviving such a tragedy.
Hogg regularly advocates for strong gun control laws and brought that message to a New Hampshire town hall this week.
Where he’s confronted with someone who’s been through another kind of horrible situation and doesn’t agree with his opinion on guns.
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“I will never give up my weapons”
A woman who had lived under Chinese communism approached the microphone during a question-and-answer session.
His opinion on guns differed significantly from Hogg’s.
Lily Tang Williams said to Hogg, “Hi, my name is Lily Tang Williams. Welcome to my “Live Free or Die” state.
“Actually, I am a Chinese immigrant who survived communism,” she said. “And under Mao, 40 million people were starving after he sold them communism. And 20 million people died, murdered during his cultural revolution.”
Williams was referring to former Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong, who ruled from 1943 to 1976.
Williams continued, asking, “So my question to you, David, is can you guarantee me, a gun owner tonight, that our government in the United States, in Washington, will never, ever become a tyrannical government?”
“Can you guarantee that?” she added.
Hogg replied, “I can never guarantee that a government will not be tyrannical.”
That answer wasn’t good enough for Lily Tang Williams.
“Well, then the gun control debate is over because I will never give up my guns,” he declared. “Never never.”
“And you should go to China to see how gun control works for the CCP dictatorship,” Williams concluded.
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China has extremely strict gun control
China has some of the strictest gun restrictions in the world. CNN reported in 2021 that after the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, leaders ended up “deciding that an armed public posed a threat to security and stability in the still fragile and newly won country. For Communist Party leaders, guns were a tool of revolution, with Chairman Mao Zedong famously declaring in 1927: “Political power arises from the barrel of a gun.”
“Just two years after the founding of the People’s Republic, the government adopted measures banning citizens from privately buying, selling or manufacturing firearms,” CNN noted. “Over the years, several smaller ministries have passed gun control laws, but the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, in which the Chinese military cracked down with lethal force on university student-led protests in Beijing, marked a turning point ”.
The report added: “The government implemented new gun control rules a few months later – an extension of its broader crackdown on all forms of public dissent and organized resistance.”
So Lily Tang Williams is right. Most of us can’t imagine what it’s like to live under such a repressive authoritarian regime, as you did. We should respect her experience.
David Hogg should too.
