The Nazi gun control argument is the claim that gun regulations in Nazi Germany helped facilitate the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust. Historians and fact-checkers have characterized the argument as dubious or false, and point out that Jews were under 1% of the population and that it would be unrealistic for such a small population to defend themselves even if they were armed.
The argument is frequently employed by opponents of gun control in debates on United States gun politics, citing security against tyranny. Those against the argument most often call it an example of reductio ad Hitlerum.
Background
In early 1930s Germany, few citizens owned, or were entitled to own firearms with the Weimar Republic having strict gun control laws. When the Nazi party gained power, some aspects of gun regulation were loosened for Nazi party members only. The laws were tightened in other ways, such as specifically banning ownership of guns by Jews. Nazi laws systematically disarmed so-called "unreliable" persons, especially Jews while relaxing restrictions for Nazi party members. The policies were later expanded to include the confiscation of arms in occupied countries.
Argument
According to gun rights activist and former National Rifle Association board member Neal Knox, the Nazi gun control hypothesis was first suggested in a 1992 book by Jay Simkin and Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO) founder Aaron S. Zelman. In it, they compared the German gun laws of 1928 and 1938 and the United States congressional hearings preceding the Gun Control Act of 1968. Supporters of the Nazi gun control argument point to a request by U.S. senator Thomas J. Dodd to the Library of Congress for a translation of the 1938 Nazi law. Dodd was a prosecutor during the post-war Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, and as a senator he sponsored gun control bills that led to creation of the 1968 law.
In a 2000 article, National Rifle Association (NRA) attorney Stephen Halbrook said he was presenting "the first scholarly analysis of the use of gun control laws and policies to establish the Hitler regime and to render political opponents and especially German Jews defenseless." In the article, he cites an Adolf Hitler quote: "the most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms." Other gun advocates such as Halbrook, Zelman, and NRA leader Wayne LaPierre have proposed that Nazi Party policies and laws were an enabling factor in the Holocaust, that prevented its victims from implementing an effective resistance. Associate professor of criminal justice M. Dyan McGuire wrote in her 2011 book: "It is frequently argued that these laws, which resulted in the confiscation of weapons not belonging to supporters of the Nazis, rendered the Jews and other disfavored groups like the Gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, and their potential allies defenseless and set the stage for the slaughter of the Holocaust that followed."
The Nazi gun control argument has been used as a "security against tyranny" argument in U.S. gun politics.
Legal scholar and historian Robert Cottrol has argued that other authoritarian regimes such as the Khmer Rouge could have been inhibited by more private gun ownership.
A 2011 open letter from Dovid Bendory, who was the rabbinic director of JPFO, to then New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, asked: "Are you aware that the Nazis disarmed Jews prior to Kristallnacht and that those same Nazi gun laws are the foundation of the U.S. Gun Control Act of 1968?"
In October 2015, U.S. Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said that Hitler's mass murder of Jews "would have been greatly diminished" if Germans had not been disarmed by the Nazis.
In February 2018, U.S. Republican representative Don Young questioned, "How many Jews were put in the ovens because they were unarmed?"
Criticism
Fact-checkers have described this theory as "false" or "debunked".