
Innocents Betrayed
The argument at the center of this film is that gun control has historically been a tool for enabling mass violence rather than preventing it. Produced by Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, it moves country by country through the twentieth century's genocides, pairing archival photographs and newsreel footage with the specific disarmament laws that preceded each one, in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Ottoman Turkey, Rwanda, Uganda, and Communist China. Historical documents and legal text appear onscreen as evidence, with narration connecting registration and confiscation statutes to the killings that followed. The film then turns to the United States, arguing that firearm restrictions have at times targeted black Americans, Native Americans, and other marginalized groups, and presenting that history as a warning rather than a settled precedent. The tone is polemical rather than balanced: there is no on-camera debate with historians who dispute the causal claims, only a steady accumulation of case studies meant to build one argument. It closes by asking viewers to weigh that argument against current gun policy debates.