Ben Carson Blames Holocaust On Gun Control

MagentaYenta

Thu, Oct 08 2015, 4:14 pm

From today's Huffpo
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....185c2

Ben Carson, a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, blamed the Holocaust on Nazi gun control in an interview on CNN Thursday.

Host Wolf Blitzer read a section from Carson's book, A More Perfect Union, in which Carson writes:

German citizens were disarmed by their government in the late 1930s, and by the mid-1940s Hitler's regime had mercilessly slaughtered six million Jews and numerous others whom they considered inferior ... Through a combination of removing guns and disseminating deceitful propaganda, the Nazis were able to carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance.
"I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed," Carson elaborated in the interview. "There's a reason these dictatorial people take the guns first."

The Anti-Defamation League, which monitors and responds to anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry, has long opposed the use of Nazi comparisons in the U.S. gun control debate. "The idea that supporters of gun control are doing something akin to what Hitler’s Germany did to strip citizens of guns in the run-up to the Second World War is historically inaccurate and offensive, especially to Holocaust survivors and their families," Abraham Foxman, the ADL's national director at the time, said in 2013.

Conservatives have a history of comparing gun control advocates to Hitler and the Nazis. The ADL's 2013 comments were provoked by The Drudge Report's choice to use an image of Hitler to illustrate news that President Barack Obama was pursuing limited gun control measures after 20 first-graders and six school staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, were murdered by a gunman.

Many historians disagree with the idea that armed German Jews could have prevented the Holocaust. And as Alex Seitz-Wald, a journalist then writing for Salon, explained in 2013, the full story of Nazi gun regulation is more complicated than Carson and his ilk might like:

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....
[Hitler's] "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 1938 law did ban Jews from owning guns. But as the ADL explained in 2013, "the small number of personal firearms in the hands of the small number of Germany’s Jews (about 214,000) remaining in Germany in 1938 could in no way have stopped the totalitarian power of the Nazi German state," which eventually conquered most of Europe.

There was some armed Jewish resistance to the power of the Nazi war machine. But it often ended in death for the Jews involved.

n January 1943, Jews in the Warsaw ghetto rose up against the Nazis. Some 13,000 Jews died in the uprising. (They killed around 20 Nazis.) The rest were deported to concentration and extermination camps, where most were murdered.

My grandfather and grandmother had escaped from the ghetto before the uprising and gone into hiding in the countryside. They survived.

PinkFridge

Thu, Oct 08 2015, 7:31 pm

Well, he didn't have my vote to lose in the first place.
What's next - slavery could have been averted with gun control? Scratching Head

We're talking about an outnumbered minority against a well-oiled majority machine. (Leaving aside hashkafa that I wouldn't expect him to be referencing.)
The more I type, forget about the vote that wasn't his to lose. Any respect I had for him - and it was there - is fading....

bluebird

Fri, Oct 09 2015, 1:05 pm

Right, I'm sure a well-armed German citizenry definitely would have come to the armed defense of Jews.

PinkFridge

Fri, Oct 09 2015, 1:27 pm

As a P.S. I just heard Dennis Prager excoriate the ADL: they took it out of context, etc.
It still seems really illogical to me, leave aside the distasteful.

gp2.0

Fri, Oct 09 2015, 1:34 pm

bluebird wrote:

Right, I'm sure a well-armed German citizenry definitely would have come to the armed defense of Jews.

Exactly. I've heard this point brought up recently: gun enthusiasts claim that they want weapons to protect their freedoms and rights. But the only right they're actually protecting is the right to own a gun. When it comes to any other issue that is affecting human rights, the pro-gun camp is largely silent. Perhaps if they regularly did stand up for human rights, their argument that guns protect the people would have some validity.

sequoia

Sat, Oct 10 2015, 11:47 pm

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion......html

PinkFridge

Sun, Oct 11 2015, 8:45 am

From Hamodia's satire page - ISIS: Ben Carson Will Never Lead a Muslim Country

(Can't open the Fox link, tempted to ask for override.)

WhatFor

Sun, Oct 11 2015, 11:01 am

Yes, because if the American government turns on its people, guns will protect the civilians from the US armed forces, which possess, for example, drones, tanks, and nuclear capacity. Unless, of course, private civilians should also be in possession of everything the US army has. Just in case.

vintagebknyc

Sun, Oct 11 2015, 12:31 pm

I'm very interested to see how this plays out.

Why hasn't the ADL come out protesting? Many religious Jews vote GOP across the board, is this enough to stop that?

octopus

Sun, Oct 11 2015, 3:02 pm

oh blah, blah, blah. The ultra liberal media keeps on taking everything Ben Carson says out of context.

PAMOM

Sun, Oct 11 2015, 3:16 pm

Octopus, could you please explain what had been taken out of context and how? That's a real question.

CatLady

Sun, Oct 11 2015, 3:50 pm

Way to court the Jewish vote with victim-blaming, Dr. Carson! If Africans would have been armed several hundred years ago, would slavery have been curtailed? What about other atrocities, such as Darfur? Or crimes against the individual, which are too numerous and painful to mention? I abhor the "they were asking for it" mentality, whether it's directed against an entire group of people, or a woman who dared wear a short skirt on the day she crossed paths with an aggressor.

Although if I were to submit a script on spec to Quentin Tarantino, this'd be the one.

octopus

Sun, Oct 11 2015, 9:38 pm

listen to the interview, please. Then decide within context what ben carson was trying to say. He does not blame the holocaust on gun control. He says the first step in any tyrannical rulership is disarming the people.

octopus

Sun, Oct 11 2015, 9:39 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8HJfpblfeE

imasoftov

Mon, Oct 12 2015, 2:32 am

If the dinosaurs had weapons, they could have shot down the comet before it wiped them out.

DrMom

Mon, Oct 12 2015, 2:40 am

octopus wrote:

This. But hey, the media does not pass over any opportunity to smear a Conservative.

chaiz

Mon, Oct 12 2015, 7:40 am

I think this article is a great response to what he said.

https://medium.com/@AviWoolf/g.....3a35e

PinkFridge

Mon, Oct 12 2015, 7:45 am

chaiz wrote:

I think this article is a great response to what he said.

https://medium.com/@AviWoolf/g.....3a35e

The thing is, for this to work, armed people need to be armed, not keep the arms in some safely locked, not so accessible safe.

SRS

Mon, Oct 12 2015, 8:30 am

Can no one read or hear? Ben Carson points out that the Holocaust might have been *different* if *the people (the German populace)* had not been disarmed and forced to submit to tyranny.

Everyone is in a hissy for no reason. And what in the world is this narrative that the resistance was futile because of the strength of the Nazi machine? What ever happened to the concept "if only one life. . . "? What about the idea of not going down without a fight?

chaiz

Mon, Oct 12 2015, 8:37 am

SRS wrote:

Everyone is in a hissy for no reason. And what in the world is this narrative that the resistance was futile because of the strength of the Nazi machine? What ever happened to the concept "if only one life. . . "? What about the idea of not going down without a fight?

You are right that not going down without a fight can be a virtue and each life does count. But I am still not sure the holocaust could have been avoided just by virtue of gun ownership being legal and common.