Misplaced Pages

Nazi gun control argument

Article snapshot taken from[REDACTED] with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Lightbreather (talk | contribs) at 22:47, 22 April 2014 (→top: since there's debate on where it falls). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Revision as of 22:47, 22 April 2014 by Lightbreather (talk | contribs) (→top: since there's debate on where it falls)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff) This article is about a hypothesis regarding gun laws in Nazi Germany and other authoritarian regimes. For the history of German gun laws, see Gun legislation in Germany.

Nazi gun control is a fringe theory or historical revisionism hypothesis that Nazi Germany gun laws were a significant component of the Third Reich's plan, and that victims, especially Jews, might have effectively resisted repression if they had been armed.

Proponents of the Nazi gun control hypothesis are primarily U.S. gun-rights advocates, and discussion of Nazi gun laws in this context is almost exclusively aimed at U.S. gun laws and policies. When discussing the hypothesis, adherents sometimes cite other authoritarian regimes like Stalinist Russia and the Khmer Rouge.

Many consider Nazi gun control to be a fringe theory because it is not supported by history, Holocaust, or political science scholarship.

Nazi gun control hypothesis

The earliest references to the Nazi gun control hypothesis are in the U.S. Congressional hearings for what became the Gun Control Act of 1968. Proponents of the hypothesis posit a counterfactual history question: What if the Nazis had not disarmed the German Jews and other groups? They suggest such victims might have successfully resisted Nazi repression if they had been armed - or better armed. Gun rights advocates such as gun law litigator Stephen Halbrook, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre, and JFPO leader Aaron Zelman, have argued that Nazi Party policies and laws were an enabling factor in the Holocaust that prevented its victims from implementing an effective resistance. Their arguments refer to laws that disarmed "unreliable" persons, especially Jews, but relaxed restrictions for "ordinary" German citizens, and to the later confiscation of arms arms in countries it occupied.

Modern proponents of the security-against-tyranny argument often discuss a counterfactual history in which the Nazis did not disarm groups like the German Jews and other suppressed populations. Historians have tended to not address gun regulation under the Nazis, and its significance is disputed. Robert Cottrol asked:

Could the overstretched Nazi war machine have murdered 11 million armed and resisting Europeans while also taking on the Soviet and Anglo-American armies? Could 50,000-70,000 Khmer Rouge have butchered 2-3 million armed Cambodians? These questions bear repeating. The answers are by no means clear, but it is unconscionable they are not being asked.

Reactions to the hypothesis

Holocaust scholar, Michael Bryant, says gun-rights advocates Stephen Halbrook, Dave Kopel, Wayne LaPierre, Aaron Zelman, and others' "use of history has selected factual inaccuracies, and their methodology can be questioned." According to legal scholar Bernard Harcourt, the disarming and killing of the Jews was unconnected with Nazi gun control policy, and it is "absurd to even try to characterize this as either pro- or anti-gun control," but that if one had to choose, the Nazi regime was pro-gun compared with the Weimar Republic that preceded it. He says that gun rights advocates disagree about the relationship between Nazi gun control and the Holocaust, with many distancing themselves from the idea. White nationalist William L. Pierce wrote, "When you have read , you will understand that it was Hitler's enemies, not Hitler, who should be compared with the gun-control advocates in America today." Robert Spitzer has said—as has Harcourt—that the quality of Halbrook's historical research is poor. Opposing Halbrook's argument that gun control leads to authoritarian regimes, Spitzer says that "actual cases of nation-building and regime change, including but not limited to Germany, if anything support the opposite position." In January 2013, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) director Abraham Foxman 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."

See also

Notes

References

  1. Knox, Neal (2009). The Gun Rights War: Dispatches from the Front Lines 1966 - 2000. Phoenix, Arizona: MacFarlane. p. 286. ISBN 9780976863304.
  2. Winkler, Adam (2011). Gunfight:The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 339. ISBN 9780393077414.
  3. Halbrook, Stephen P. (2013). Gun Control in the Third Reich. Independent Institute. ISBN 978-1-59813-162-8.
  4. ^ Harcourt, Bernard E. (2004). "On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler, and Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding the Gun Culture Wars (A Call to Historians)". Fordham Law Review. 73 (2): 653–680.
  5. ^ Halbrook, Stephen P. (2000). "Nazi Firearms Law and the Disarming of the German Jews" (PDF). Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law. 17 (3): 483–535.
  6. LaPierre, Wayne (1994). Guns, Crime, and Freedom. Washington, D.C.: Regnery. OCLC 246629786.
  7. Michael S. Bryant (2012). "Holocaust Imagery and Gun Control". In Gregg Lee Carter (ed.). Guns in American Society. ABC-CLIO. pp. 411–415. ISBN 978-0-313-38670-1.
  8. Halbrook, Stephen. Gun Control in the Third Reich (The Independent Institute 2013).
  9. Kohn, Abigail. Shooters : Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures, p. 187 n. 36 (Oxford University Press, 2004).
  10. Winkler, A. (2013). Gunfight : the battle over the right to bear arms in America. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. p. 236. ISBN 9780393345834.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
  11. Harcourt, Bernard (2004). "On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler, and Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding the Gun Culture Wars (A Call to Historians)". Fordham Law Review: 670, 676, 679. "To be sure, the Nazis were intent on killing Jewish persons and used the gun laws and regulations to further the genocide....istorians have paid scant attention to the history of firearms regulation in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich."
  12. ^ Cottrol, Robert. “The Last Line of Defense” (op-ed), Los Angeles Times (November 7, 1999).
  13. ^ Bryant, Michael S. (May 4, 2012). "Holocaust Imagery and Gun Control". In Carter, Gregg Lee (ed.). Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture and the Law. Vol. 2 (2nd ed.). Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. pp. 411–415. ISBN 9780313386701. OCLC 833189121. Retrieved March 21, 2014.
  14. Spitzer, Robert J. (2004). "Don't Know Much About History, Politics, or Theory: A Comment". Fordham Law Review. 73 (2): 721–730.
  15. "ADL Says Nazi Analogies Have No Place In Gun Control Debate" (Press release). New York: Anti-Defamation League. January 24, 2013.

Further reading

Works that endorse the Nazi gun law hypothesis

  • "Simkin, Jay; Zelman, Aaron (1992). Gun Control: Gateway to Tyranny. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. p. 139. OCLC 29535251."

Works that criticize the Nazi gun law hypothesis

External links

This article related to the politics of the United States is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

Categories:
Nazi gun control argument Add topic