Mao Tse-tung
"We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun." —Ron Bloom, President Obama's "Manufacturing Czar"
Chairman Mao inherited gun control when he came to power, and took full advantage of it, killing or starving millions of Chinese who had no power to resist during his reign.
The Hundred Flowers Campaign
In 1956, Mao introduced a program ("to let 100 flowers bloom," ostensibly to promote the "flourishing of the arts and the progress of science") that encouraged citizens to express their opinions of the communist regime. Shortly afterward, he began a crackdown against those who had voiced opposition, conducting public demonizations and ridicule, and/or sending them to prison labor camps. Mao bragged that he had "enticed the snakes out of their caves."
The Great Leap Forward
While it is conceivable that Mao initially thought that taking large numbers of workers from agriculture to be cheap labor in heavy industry would lead to prosperity, his efforts soon proved to be a disaster. Even after this was pointed out to him, he doubled down on his policies. There is evidence that he intentionally withheld grain from his citizens, having told his party confidants "When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill."
Bureaucrats were ordered to destroy records of surplus grain in areas with high starvation rates. Party officials send high percentages of harvests to the most visible population centers and even exported much of the grain in order to keep up the appearance of prosperity.
When it started to become obvious that there was not enough food to go around, Mao launched "anti-grain concealment" drives where party officials would go from village to village in search of hidden food reserves. Peasants accused of hiding food were tortured and killed. Persons who spoke out, even public officials who reported food shortages to the government, were put into prison camps to die of starvation.
Mao's policies led to massive starvation deaths from 1958 to 1961; when you add in the purges and political executions, he killed an estimated 18 to 45 million Chinese. This is roughly comparable to wiping out the entire population of California.
Even though Chairman Mao has passed on, there are still too many reports of executions, imprisonments, and other atrocities that the rest of the world refers to as "civil rights violations."
