Gun Supporters Use of Nazi, Hitler References Irritates Historians
In the months since the Newtown, Conn., school massacre, some gun rights supporters have repeatedly compared U.S. gun control efforts to Nazi restrictions on firearms, arguing that limiting weapons ownership could leave Americans defenseless against homegrown tyrants.
But some experts say that argument distorts a complex and contrary history. In reality, scholars say, Hitler loosened the tight gun laws that governed Germany after World War I, even as he barred Jews from owning weapons and moved to confiscate them.
Advocates who cite Hitler in the current U.S. debate overlook that Jews in 1930s Germany were a very small population, owned few guns before the Nazis took control, and lived under a dictatorship commanding overwhelming public support and military might, historians say. While it doesn’t fit neatly into the modern-day gun debate, they say, the truth is that for all Hitler’s unquestionably evil acts, his firearms laws likely made no difference in Jews’ very tenuous odds of survival.
“Objectively, it might have made things worse” if the Jews who fought the Nazis in Poland’s 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising had more and better guns, said historian Steve Paulsson, an expert on the period whose Jewish family survived the city’s destruction.
But comparisons between a push by gun control advocates in the U.S. and Hitler have become so common - in online comments and letters to newspaper editors, at gun rights protests and in public forums - they’re often asserted as fact, rather than argument.
More: Gun Supporters Use of Nazi, Hitler References Irritates Historians