Ben Carson and the Myth of Nazi Gun Control

Dr. Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and Republican candidate for US President, has made a number of outrageous comments, which, under normal circumstances would immediately disqualify him for the office. For Dr. Carson, America today is Weimar Germany, and President Obama is leading the nation to a new Third Reich.  As the Washington Post recently pointed out, the good doctor is the biggest fan of Nazi metaphors in politics. This week, in response to an other mass shooting on a college campus, Dr. Carson resurrected on of the more persistent myths embraced by right-wing Republicans – namely, that Adolf Hitler’s mass murder of Jews “would have been greatly diminished” if German citizens had not been disarmed by the Nazi regime. It has always been an article of faith among American gun fetishists that "the first thing Hitler did was round up all the guns."

The myth of Nazi gun control was exploded already in 2004 by Bernard E. Harcourt in his article On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding the Gun Culture Wars (pdf warning) published in the Journal of the University of Chicago Law School.  It turns out, as Harcourt documents, that the Nazis relaxed many of the gun ownership restrictions that were put in place during the Weimar Republic (as required under the Versailles Treaty). And one could argue that the Nazi Party might not have successfully seized power if gun laws had been strictly enforced during the Weimar Republic, since Hitler had few problems procuring illegal weapons for his paramilitary troops such as the SA. 

It is true that after the Novemberpogrom of 1938 the Nazi regime expressly forbade Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and other "undesirables" from owning any weapons (Waffengesetz von 1938), but it is not clear at all that this had any significant effect on the persecution of Jews. And it is patently absurd to point to this as the cause of the Holocaust.  The Jews that were detained and then deported after 1938 tended to be older and less-well off; most Jews with any resources left Germany much earlier.  The deportation took place with the open or tacit approval and complicity of the vast majority of Germans; any act of armed resistance would have been completely futile.   In any case, most of the Jews who perished in in the Nazi death camps were non-Germans and not subject to the Waffengesetz. 

This table shows that comparatively few German Jews were murdered by the Nazis compared with Jews in Hungary, Poland and the Soviet Union:

But don't expect Ben Carson to retract his statement or apologize for his astounding ignorance concerning the Holocaust. And don't expect any rational discussion of history to change the Gun Control = Holocaust hysteria.  There is a segment of white males in America who fantasize about using their AR-15 military assault rifles to mow down Obama's gay Muslim storm-troopers who will be coming to a neighborhood near you to take your guns.