Ben Carson says gun control contributed to Holocaust
During an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson seemed to compare gun control lobbyists to Nazis.
During an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson suggested the Holocaust happened because of Nazi gun control laws.
Blitzer read from a section of Carson’s book, A More Perfect Union, on the subject of gun control:
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.
Carson then went on to say, “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed. There’s a reason these dictatorial people take the guns first.”
As Nick Bauman from the Huffington Post points out, in 2013 Abraham Foxman, then national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which has long opposed the use of the Nazi regime in discussions of gun control, said, “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.”