{"id":68663,"date":"2021-06-03T00:47:21","date_gmt":"2021-06-03T05:47:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=68663"},"modified":"2021-06-03T00:47:21","modified_gmt":"2021-06-03T05:47:21","slug":"68663","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=68663","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Yes, Gun Control Did Help Facilitate The Holocaust<\/a><\/p>\n

The Holocaust is one of the most horrible events in human history. It became the benchmark by which we compare atrocities, and for good reason. Millions of Jews slaughtered. Millions more put through some of the worst abuses a person can visit upon another. It was awful in so many ways.<\/p>\n

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However, we on the gun right side have pointed out over and over again that if the Jews had been able to have guns, the Holocaust may<\/strong> never have happened.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Unsurprisingly,\u00a0some people disagree<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But the freshman congresswoman is hardly the only figure in the nation to have manipulated the Holocaust. The National Rifle Association, or at least its modern leaders led by its now embattled CEO, Wayne LaPierre, have long searched for \u201cproof\u201d that gun control is nothing more than a\u00a0slippery slope<\/a>\u00a0to genocide. And in recent years, the NRA has manipulated the Holocaust to claim they finally found it, funding research that has allegedly discovered a new link between gun control and the Holocaust that generations of scholars have yet to find.<\/p>\n

In 2013, the Anti-Defamation League\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0\u201cNazi Analogies Have No Place In Gun Control Debate\u201d after a half dozen commentators including Sean Hannity and Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News out of the blue all raised the matter of gun control and the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and the ammunition that the Nazis did, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust,\u201d\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0Napolitano.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s as if they were all laying the groundwork for the book, \u201cGun Control in The Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and \u2018Enemies of the State,\u2019\u201d published later that year by the Independent Institute, a small think-tank in Oakland. Research for this book was\u00a0partly funded<\/a>\u00a0by the NRA. Its author, Stephen P. Halbrook, is the nation\u2019s best-known pro-gun lawyer. Several years before, during the watershed gun rights case Heller vs. District of Columbia that established that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep arms, Halbrook filed a successful\u00a0amicus brief<\/a>\u00a0on behalf of 250 members of the House of Representatives, 55 senators, and the president of the Senate, then-Vice President Dick Cheney.<\/p>\n

Halbrook\u2019s thesis about gun control and the Holocaust is novel at best. Most Holocaust scholars, like Alan E. Steinweis, director of holocaust studies at the University of Vermont,\u00a0say<\/a>\u00a0that the idea that gun control was a factor in the Holocaust is \u201csimply a nonissue.\u201d But\u00a0Halbrook claims<\/a>\u00a0that prior gun control laws during the Weimer Republic, or Germany\u2019s democratic years before Hitler took power, were used to seize firearms from Jews, enough to have helped enable the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Never mind the weak evidence, the NRA\u2019s house organ crowed about the book\u2019s supposed breakthrough.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The problem with this line of \u201creasoning\u201d is that they\u2019re demanding pro-gun voices provide proof for something that wasn\u2019t allowed to happen.<\/p>\n

Did the Weimar Republic ban guns? Yes.<\/p>\n

Were the Jews in Nazi Germany armed? No.<\/p>\n

As such, were they able to offer armed resistance when herded into concentration camps? Also, no.<\/p>\n

No one is saying that the Weimar Republic actively sought to empower those that followed them to commit genocide against the Jewish people. No one is claiming that things proceeded along a set plan all built around the idea of exterminating not just the Jews but also homosexuals and gypsies.<\/p>\n

To make\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0claim, you\u2019d need a great deal of evidence and that evidence likely doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n

However, there\u2019s ample reason to suggest that the Nazis could capitalize on the existing laws and take advantage of a disarmed population. In fact, no one disputes the fact they were disarmed and while some claim the Holocaust didn\u2019t happen, I don\u2019t really care about their opinions on much of anything.<\/p>\n

Now, let\u2019s also be clear that we can\u2019t be certain that an armed population would have prevented the Holocaust. Even in the modern United States where guns outnumber people, a lot of folks are unarmed by choice. That would likely have been true right up until the Nazis decided to put the Jews in concentration camps. How many would have been able to fight back?<\/p>\n

Frankly, we\u2019ll never know.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What we do know definitively is that the laws on the books made it impossible for anyone to offer armed resistance. That\u2019s all the evidence we really need, though the book mentioned in the above-linked article has far more than that. We know the Jews\u00a0couldn\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0resist and can surmise that had they been able to resist, things might have gone differently.<\/p>\n

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At the very least, more Jews may have escaped the horrors of the camps. This shouldn\u2019t be a controversial point, and yet those who advocate for gun control refuse to concede it. To do so would be to acknowledge that guns in the hands of private citizens at least can<\/em>\u00a0be a good thing, which goes against every fiber of their being, so instead, they lash out and pretend that there\u2019s no way armed Jews could have fought back.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Would the camps have existed without gun control laws in Germany at the time, though? Well, since it\u2019s better to die on your own terms than be imprisoned despite committing no crime beyond existing, I think a lot of Jews would have armed themselves and been prepared, enough so that the camps wouldn\u2019t have happened.<\/p>\n

More likely, though, was that if the Weimar Republic hadn\u2019t set the groundwork with their gun control laws, Hitler would have simply implemented his own and still rounded the Jews up. The Holocaust would still have happened.<\/p>\n

Only then, he\u2019d have more of a fight and while it\u2019s impossible to tell how that would have happened, I suspect a lot of Jews killed in the concentration camps would have either died in the fighting or have escaped Germany.<\/p>\n

But, again, we can\u2019t know for certain.<\/p>\n

What we do know, though, is that those laws existed and the Jews were unable to resist. It\u2019s well past time for gun control advocates to acknowledge this fact and admit that it may well have played a role in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

Fat chance of that happening, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, Gun Control Did Help Facilitate The Holocaust The Holocaust is one of the most horrible events in human history. It became the benchmark by which we compare atrocities, and for good reason. Millions of Jews slaughtered. Millions more put through some of the worst abuses a person can visit upon another. It was awful … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,24,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-rights","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=68663"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68665,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68663\/revisions\/68665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=68663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=68663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=68663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}