During an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on October 8, presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson (shown) made a simple statement that defenders of the right to keep and bear arms have being making for years — that Nazi Germany’s strict gun control laws increased the vulnerability of Germany’s Jews and made the Holocaust easier for the Nazis to perpetrate. While the remarks were hardly novel, the mass media has repeatedly labeled them as “controversial,” thereby creating its own controversy.
During the interview, Blitzer asked Carson to comment on an excerpt from his new book, A Perfect Union, in which he wrote, “… through a combination of removing guns and disseminating propaganda, the Nazis were able to carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance.”
Blitzer asked the candidate, “Just clarify, if there had been no gun control laws in Europe at that time, would six million Jews have been slaughtered?”
Since Blitzer’s question had oversimplified Carson’s position, Carson expanded on it by providing his beliefs on how the situation might have been different had Germany’s Jews and other citizens been armed:
I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed. I’m telling you there is a reason these dictatorial people take guns first.
In response to Carson’s remarks, the ultra-liberal Anti-Defamation League was quick to issue a critical statement:
Ben Carson has a right to his views on gun control, but the notion that Hitler’s gun-control policy contributed to the Holocaust is historically inaccurate. The small number of personal firearms available to Germany’s Jews in 1938 could in no way have stopped the totalitarian power of the Nazi German state.
The next morning, speaking to George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America, Carson responded to the ADL:
That’s total foolishness. I’d be happy to discuss that in depth with anybody but it is well known that in many places where tyranny has taken over they first disarm the people. There’s a reason they disarm the people. They don’t just do it arbitrarily.
The illogic of the ADL’s statement — which accused Carson of being “historically inaccurate” — is immediately obvious. They claimed that “the small number of personal firearms available to Germany’s Jews in 1938 could in no way have stopped the totalitarian power of the Nazi German state.” However, they never addressed the obvious explanation for that state of disarmament in which Germany’s Jews found themselves — Germany’s draconian gun control laws!
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The most notorious and blatantly anti-Jewish of these was the “Regulations Against Jews’ Possession of Weapons,” promulgated by Germany’s Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick on November 11, 1938. (After World War II, Frick was tried for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials and executed.)
In “Nazi Firearms Laws and the Disarming of the German Jews,” an article in the Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law written in 2000, constitutional lawyer Stephen P. Halbrook (author of Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming Jews and “Enemies of the State“) wrote:
After five years of repression and eradication of dissidents, Hitler signed a new gun control law in 1938, which benefited Nazi party members and entities, but denied firearm ownership to enemies of the state. Later that year, in Kristallnacht (the Night of the Broken Glass), in one fell swoop, the Nazi regime disarmed Germany’s Jews. Without any ability to defend themselves, the Jewish population could easily be sent to concentration camps for the Final Solution.
In continuing his article, Halbrook so clearly makes the connection between German gun control laws and the Holocaust that the ADL’s rant against Carson should be regarded as nothing short of ridiculous:
Gun control laws are depicted as benign and historically progressive. However, German firearm laws and hysteria created against Jewish firearm owners played a major role in laying the groundwork for the eradication of German Jewry in the Holocaust. Disarming political opponents was a categorical imperative of the Nazi regime. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution declares: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” This right, which reflects a universal and historical power of the people in a republic to resist tyranny, was not recognized in the German Reich.
The late Aaron Zelman, founder of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO), wrote a book entitled Gun Control, Gateway to Tyranny that compared the Nazi Weapons Law of 1938 to the U.S. Gun Control Act of 1968 to demonstrate how the U.S. legislation was modeled closely after the earlier Nazi law. Zelman wrote an article collecting material from that book that appeared in Guns and Ammo Magazine in May 1993 entitled “Gun Control’s Nazi Connection.”
In his article, Zelman wrote:
The 1938 Nazi law barred Jews from businesses involving firearms. On November 10, 1938 — one day after the Nazi party terror squads (the SS) savaged thousands of Jews, synagogues and Jewish businesses throughout Germany — new regulations under the Weapons Law specifically barred Jews from owning any weapons, even clubs or knives.
Given the parallels between the Nazi Weapons Law and the GCA ’68, we concluded that the framers of the GCA ’68 — lacking any basis in American law to sharply cut back the civil rights of law abiding Americans — drew on the Nazi Weapons Law of 1938.
The media has labeled as “controversial” Carson’s statement that gun control in Nazi Germany made that nation’s Jewish population defenseless — a condition that greatly facilitated Nazi efforts to carry out the mass extermination at the concentration camps. The ADL called his views “historically inaccurate” and even “offensive.” Since Carson’s assertions are strongly supported by research done by Halbrook, Zelman, and others, why do the liberal media and liberal ADL take such exception to his views on a historic event that took place over 70 years ago?
The answer may lie in Zelman’s research indicating that the U.S. Gun Control Act of 1968 was largely modeled after the 1938 German law. Though — largely due to the efforts of zealous defenders of the right to keep and bear arms — gun control in the United States has been forcefully resisted and is not nearly as pervasive as it was in Nazi Germany, the gun control advocates never rest. They constantly attempt to achieve incrementally what the Nazis accomplished in one fell swoop. Every time there is a mass shooting, such as the one on October 1 at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon, they take to their soapboxes to campaign for stricter gun control laws.
If Carson’s reference to the connection between Germany’s gun control laws of 1938 and the Holocaust serves to remind Americans where gun control can lead, once it becomes total, it will help to deter another threat to our freedom.
However, those who would destory our right to keep and bear arms do not like statements such as Carson’s and consider them to be “controversial,” “historically inaccurate,” “offensive,” and anything except true.
Photo: AP Images
Related articles:
Gun-free Zones Contribute to Mass Slayings, Say Many Experts
No Compromise Against Gun Control: Aaron Zelman Interviewed
The Passing of Aaron Zelman, Founder of JPFO
Senators Manchin and Toomey Consider Reviving Failed Gun Control Legislation
Federal Judge Rules Municipal Police Can Never Be Considered Soldiers
When Local Police Become a “Standing Army”
The Past as Prelude: Nazi Disarmament and the U.S. Gun Grab
Nazi Gun Control Laws: a Familiar Road to Citizen Disarmament?
