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Thanks for this very detailed post. It's annoying when people throw around statements without any facts. I like it when people do their research. I'm not really sure what to take of all this though. So, these three leaders were responsible for the death of millions. For at least some time, the all had very lax gun control laws. So, will more murders happen when there is less gun control? Or will there be less? Or perhaps it's not correlated at all?
Agree that false or incomplete facts are not helpful. But Snopes is hardly the place to get 'facts' on any of a number of contentious subjects. 'Gun control' is certainly one of these.
Leadership though the ages has had a conundrum. For one, they want their fighting age men to have proficiency with weapons (esp, long bows) so that their conquests are more successful. On the other hand, most leadership (rightly) fears their own citizens more than any other threat more often than not.
Hitler knew he was going to be popular and knew he would need riflemen, so gun proficiency was encouraged at an early age among most of the population. He did do gun confiscation against certain classes of people and, unsurprisingly, these people were later to be sorely wishing they had some self defense and were to suffer greatly for their loss.
The average Chinese could not afford a bowl of rice so no matter what Mao's policy (which doubtless shifted as the revolution progressed), there was never a danger of very many guns. Indeed, the tactics in China's conflict with the U.S. was driven by an inadequate supply of weapons and consisted of supplying only the front ranks with rifles. When the front ranks got mowed down, the later ranks picked up the rifles that were dropped by the recently dead. This lack of weapons did not 'serve the people' very well...though it helped with China's burgeoning demographics problems.
The Soviet Union were communists, and commies do what commies do. Namely, obtain complete control of everything possible and produce a massive death toll against anything and anyone, real or imagined, which might pose a future threat to their grip on power.
Any thinking analyst should be asking themselves why to hard-core push (world-wide) to propagandize against anything which could be used by populations for self defense. Why is it so important to the United Nations in particular? What are the conditions under which people might be so desperate as to pick up arms to defend themselves (which is unthinkable to most Americans at this point), and is the United Nations anticipating such a scenario? Are they in fact even planning it? If so, are they waiting patiently for the United States with it's very deep constitutional protections to dis-arm before their plans can proceed forward?