Right Wing Republicans Again Pushing "Hitler's Gun Control Theory" To Obstruct Any Restrictions- Just Another Lethal "Big Lie."
Right Wing Republicans Again Pushing "Hitler's Gun Control Theory" To Obstruct Any Restrictions- Just Another Lethal "Big Lie."
Pennsylvania GOP Gubernatorial Candidate Douglas Mastriano yesterday echoed the same moronic and brain dead argument which the Gun Lobby's psycho-sexually impotent, cowboy/macho penis worshippers have been repeating for decades. That Adolf Hitler's dictatorship in Germany and the Holocaust started with the imposition of German gun control laws.
In a campaign statement after Uvalde and Buffalo, Mastriano put out this old fly-gathering pile of Central Pennsylvania Amish fertilizer:
...["Douglas Mastriano, the Pennsylvania GOP nominee for governor, shared and doubled down on a 2018 video of him likening gun control to the policies of Adolf Hitler. “It’s appalling to me any time there’s a shooting, the left will jump on that as a way to advance an agenda to remove our right to bear arms,” Mastriano says in the clip. “We saw Lenin do the same thing in Russia. We saw Hitler do the same thing in Germany in the ’30s. Where does it stop? Where do the tyrants stop infringing upon our rights?”]
(*source, Vanity Fair)
Now, for the sake of argument, (not that we want to waste one AAA battery's worth of energy arguing with these self-lobotomized, undiagnosed mental patients) let's agree to not mention certain things...
For example, that Mastriano speaks frequently at meetings organized by openly anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy followers like Sean Moon of the "Rod of Iron" ministry, which believes the AR-15 is blessed by Bible scripture, and whose congregants swallow this business whole. (The argument, not the Iron Rod)
Also, for the moment we will overlook that Mastriano marched with Trump's mob on January 6th, blending in nicely with the "Camp Auschwitz T-Shirts," the Red Black and white Nazi style Trump flags, and a heavy sprinkling of those oh-so anti-tyranny and pro-freedom flags symbolic of the slaveowners rebellion, known as The Confederacy.
And finally, we won't even bring up his Masters thesis which argued for overturning civilian control of the US military in order to override the Constitution, and institute Martial Law under Military command in order to "liberate" the nation from liberals and leftists who he believes are out to ban Christianity. Of course, we all learned in high school civics that Martial Law is widely recognized as the most important preventative against tyranny, and all of the governments that use it, like Myanmar for example, are paragons of "freedom and liberty." Such are the arguments of the pathetic limp d*ck Elmer Fudds who are compulsively Oedipal in their mental lives, and whose gun/phallic fixation is centered upon impressing their mothers with the size of their weapons.
No, we won't even get into those issues, we're not going to bring them up at all. We will simply review for reasons of our own background knowledge and mental hygiene what actually happened in Germany.
According to "Politifact," which presents a comprehensive summary of the refutation of this lying piece of fascist propaganda---
["...the message that gun control measures helped cause the deaths of Holocaust victims is wrong.
Let's make something clear: The Nazis did deny guns specifically to Jews. But, given the size of their forces and their methods of confiscation and extermination, this is a trivial factor. The notion that it would have made any difference is unreasonable.
PolitiFact previously looked into the theory when Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson linked the Holocaust with U.S. gun control laws when he was running for president in 2015. We rated that claim False.
So how is it false? Let us explain.
First, strict German gun regulation was in place before Hitler rose to power and he later oversaw gun laws that loosened many firearm restrictions.
According to a 2004 analysis by Bernard Harcourt, a professor at Columbia University, after the Germany’s defeat in World War I, the Weimar Republic, the government that preceded Hitler’s, passed very stringent gun laws that essentially banned all gun ownership in an attempt to both stabilize the country and to comply with the Treaty of Versailles of 1919.
By the time the Nazi Party came around in the early 1930s, a 1928 gun registration law had replaced the total ban and, instead, created a permit system to own and sell firearms and ammunition.
But Dagmar Ellerbrock, an expert on German gun policies at the Dresden Technical University in Germany, told PolitiFact in 2015 that the order was followed "quite rarely, so that largely, only newly bought weapons became registered. At that time, most men, and many women, still owned the weapons they acquired before or during the first World War."
The Nazis used the records to confiscate guns from their enemies, but Ellerbrock also said the files included very few of the firearms in circulation and that many Jewish people and others still managed to stash away weapons into the late 1930s.
In 1938, the Nazis adopted the German Weapons Act, which "deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns as well as ammunition," Harcourt wrote.
Under this law, gun restrictions applied only to handguns, permits were extended from one year to three years, and the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18.
Moreover, many more categories of people, including holders of annual hunting permits, government workers and members of the NSDAP (the National Socialist German Workers' Party), were no longer subject to gun ownership restrictions.
Regulations were introduced, though, to impose limits on Jews.
On Nov. 11, 1938, (the same date as "Kristallnacht"-LFR) the Regulations Against Jews' Possession of Weapons was issued. Under it, Jews living under the Third Reich were forbidden to own or possess any form of weapons, including truncheons, knives, firearms and ammunition.
But the Nazis had already been raiding Jewish homes by then, and the Anti-Defamation League, an organization founded to fight anti-Semitism, explained in 2013 that "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."
Omer Bartov, a historian at Brown University who studies the Third Reich, told Salon in 2013 that even if they had weapons, 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?"
Some supporters of the theory point to the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as evidence that Jews with guns were successful in resisting Nazis. But, in that uprising, about 7,000 Jews died and 50,000 were sent off to concentration camps. Though the number of German losses from the uprising is in dispute -- ranging from estimates of less than 20 to a several hundred -- even the highest ranges come to just a fraction of the number of Jews who died.
Second, experts and historians have widely criticized the argument, calling it problematic, dubious and preposterous.
In the same 2013 statement, the Anti-Defamation League said the comparison of U.S. gun laws to the Holocaust inappropriate and offensive.
"We know that the national debate over gun control is one of the most divisive issues in the land, and while Americans are entitled to have strong opinions, there is also language that is inappropriate and offensive in any such discussion," said Abraham H. Foxman, Holocaust survivor and ADL’S national director at the time. "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."
Harcourt also told PolitiFact the suggestion is not a tenable claim.
"There’s no empirical evidence for it," he wrote in an email. "Moreover, Hitler was in favor of gun possession, and relaxed gun control laws in Germany for everyone, except Jews of course. It makes no sense to compare Hitler to the present situation in the US because all of Hitler's actions can only be interpreted through the lens of the "Final Solution", which is not relevant here in the US."
On social media, images showing the shoes of victims of gun violence in present-day America and those of Holocaust victims suggest that gun control in Nazi Germany exacerbated the Holocaust and that the genocide could have been lessened or avoided if victims had been armed.
This theory has been repeatedly debunked and refuted. German citizens as a whole were not disarmed by the Nazis, but enjoyed looser gun restrictions than in previous years. There was no lack of guns in the country, and if German citizens had wanted to use guns to revolt against the Nazis they could have, but they didn’t.
As well, comparing a dictator’s regime that treated weapon possession according to racial identity to democratic procedures of gun regulations is irresponsible."]
(end Politifact summary)
Also, in a brief note, I'll mention that the opposition to Hitler did form armed paramilitaries which engaged with the Nazis S.A. in street warfare for years. They were mostly Communists and Social Democrats who were World War I veterans, who brought their rifles and handguns home. And what did these opponents of Hitler wind up doing with their armaments? THEY FOUGHT EACH OTHER!
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin ran the German Communist Party (KPD) through the Comintern, and announced that the Social Democratic Party (SPD) were "Red fascists," more dangerous to the workers movement than the Nazis because they were more effective at masking their anti-labor policies.
The SPD in turn declared the KPD to be Soviet run, and a greater threat to German Democracy than the Nazis because Hitler was such a buffoon, a clown, that he could never legitimately gain power and hold it, whereas the Communists had shared power with the Left wing parties after the war,, and later won local and State elections, establishing "Soviets" in several cities.
So, there were plenty of guns in the hands of Hitler's opposition in Germany, but just like today's wanna be John Waynes, Dirty Harry's and weekend paintball Rambos, they were too stupid and shortsighted to know who they should use their weapons against.
This is worth mulling over. Not that you'll convince a single one of these Testosterone guzzling mama's boys of anything, flashing their Camo PJ's and walking around with 5.11 brand tactical teething rings sticking out of their faces. Don't argue with these burnouts, as it is a complete waste. Just know that we are in the right, and we should be kicking the rear ends of our Democratic leadership to make them stop playing footsie compromise games with these fascists on gun control or anything for that matter.
That would be a nice start.
(Photo credit Time Magazine- 1936) Nazis and Communists street battles in Germany)
