when the Drudge Report posted a giant picture of Hitler over a headline
speculating that the White House will proceed with executive orders to
limit access to firearms. The proposed orders are
, but Drudge’s reaction is actually a common conservative response to any invocation of gun control.
etc., all agree that gun control was critical to Hitler’s rise to power.
(“America’s most aggressive defender of firearms ownership”) is built almost exclusively around this notion, popularizing
of Hitler giving the Nazi salute next to the text: “All in favor of ‘gun control’ raise your right hand.”
,
NRA head Wayne LaPierre dwelled on the Hitler meme at length, writing:
“In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of
1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.”
And it makes a certain amount of
intuitive sense: If you’re going to impose a brutal authoritarian regime
on your populace, better to disarm them first so they can’t fight back.
Unfortunately
for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns
is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped
the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think
about it for more than a minute.
University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in
a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had
tougher
gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and
agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of
Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively
banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to
confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed
the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that
required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or
carry them.
The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions
in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The
1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of
rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile,
many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were
exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age
of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended
from one year to three years.
The law
did prohibit Jews
and other persecuted classes from owning guns, but this should not be an
indictment of gun control in general. Does the fact that Nazis forced
Jews into horrendous ghettos indict urban planning? Should we eliminate
all police officers because the Nazis used police officers
to oppress and kill the Jews? What about public works — Hitler loved
public works projects? Of course not. These are merely implements that
can be used for good or ill, much as gun advocates like to argue about
guns themselves. If guns don’t kill people, then neither does gun
control cause genocide (genocidal regimes cause genocide).
Besides,
Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third
Reich, notes that the Jews probably wouldn’t have had much success
fighting back. “Just imagine the Jews of Germany exercising the right to
bear arms and fighting the SA, SS and the Wehrmacht. The [Russian] Red
Army lost 7 million men fighting the Wehrmacht, despite its tanks and
planes and artillery. The Jews with pistols and shotguns would have done
better?” he told Salon.
Proponents of the theory sometimes point
to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as evidence that, as Fox News’ Judge
Andrew Napolitano
put it,
“those able to hold onto their arms and their basic right to
self-defense were much more successful in resisting the Nazi genocide.”
But as the Tablet’s
Michael Moynihan
points out, Napolitano’s history (curiously based on a citation of work
by French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson) is a bit off. In reality,
only about 20 Germans were killed, while some 13,000 Jews were
massacred. The remaining 50,000 who survived were promptly sent off to
concentration camps.
Robert Spitzer, a political scientist who
studies gun politics and chairs the political science department at SUNY
Cortland, told Mother Jones’ Gavin Aronsen that the prohibition on
Jewish gun ownership was merely a symptom, not the problem itself. “[It]
wasn’t the defining moment
that marked the beginning of the end for Jewish people in Germany. It
was because they were persecuted, were deprived of all of their rights,
and they were a minority group,” he explained.
Meanwhile, much of
the Hitler myth is based on an infamous quote falsely attributed to the
Fuhrer, which extols the virtue of gun control:
This
year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has
full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more
efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!
The
quote has been widely reproduced in blog posts and opinion columns
about gun control, but it’s “probably a fraud and was likely never
uttered,” according to Harcourt. “This quotation, often seen without any
date or citation at all, suffers from several credibility problems, the
most significant of which is that the date often given [1935] has no
correlation with any legislative effort by the Nazis for gun
registration, nor would there have been any need for the Nazis to pass
such a law, since gun registration laws passed by the Weimar government
were already in effect,” researchers at the useful website GunCite
note.
“As
for Stalin,” Bartov continued, “the very idea of either gun control or
the freedom to bear arms would have been absurd to him. His regime used
violence on a vast scale, provided arms to thugs of all descriptions,
and stripped not guns but any human image from those it declared to be
its enemies. And then, when it needed them, as in WWII, it took millions
of men out of the Gulags, trained and armed them and sent them to fight
Hitler, only to send back the few survivors into the camps if they
uttered any criticism of the regime.”
Bartov added that this
misreading of history is not only intellectually dishonest, but also
dangerous. “I happen to have been a combat soldier and officer in the
Israeli Defense Forces and I know what these assault rifles can do,” he
said in an email.
He continued: “Their assertion that they need
these guns to protect themselves from the government — as supposedly the
Jews would have done against the Hitler regime — means not only that
they are innocent of any knowledge and understanding of the past, but
also that they are consciously or not imbued with the type of fascist or
Bolshevik thinking that they can turn against a democratically elected
government, indeed turn their guns on it, just because they don’t like
its policies, its ideology, or the color, race and origin of its
leaders.”
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