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Chinese Immigrant Who Lived Under Communism Confronts Anti-Gun David Hogg: ‘I Will Never Give Up My Guns’

April 11, 2024

David Hogg is a high profile gun control activist who became such after being present at the 2018 Stoneman High School shooting in Florida. No matter one’s position on the Second Amendment, it’s hard for us to imagine surviving such a tragedy.

Hogg regularly advocates for strict gun control laws and brought that message to a town hall in New Hampshire this week.

Where he was confronted by someone who lived through another kind of horrific situation and disagrees with his take on guns.

‘I Will Never Give Up My Guns’

A woman approached the microphone during a Q&A session who had lived under Chinese communism.

Her view 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 to death after he sold the communism to them. 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 until 1976.

Williams continued, asking, “So my question to you, David, is that can you guarantee me, a gun owner tonight, our government in the US, in DC, will never, never become a tyrannical government?”

“Can you guarantee that to me?” she added.

Hogg replied, “There’s no way I can ever guarantee that any government will not be tyrannical.”

That answer was not good enough for Lily Tang Williams.

“Well, then the debate on gun control is over because I will never give up my guns,” she declared. “Never, never.”

“And you should go to China to see how gun control works for dictatorship of CCP,” Williams finished.

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 safety and stability in the still-fragile, newly won country. For Communist Party leaders, weapons were a means of revolution, with Chairman Mao Zedong famously declaring in 1927: ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

“Just two years after the People’s Republic was founded, the government implemented measures prohibiting citizens from buying, selling or privately manufacturing guns,” CNN noted. “Several smaller ministries had passed gun control laws over the years – but the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, in which the Chinese military crushed protests led by college students in Beijing with deadly force, marked a tipping point.”

The report added, “The government implemented new gun control regulations just months later – an extension of its wider crackdown on all forms of public dissent and organized resistance.”

So Lily Tang Williams has a point. Most of us can’t imagine what it was like to live under such a repressive authoritarian regime, like she did. We should respect her experience.

So should David Hogg.