Hitler joins gun debate, but history is in dispute

[ellisonz]

By ADAM GELLER | Associated Press – 1 hr 33 mins ago

When the president of Ohio's state school board posted her opposition to gun control, she used a powerful symbol to make her point: a picture of Adolf Hitler. When a well-known conservative commentator decried efforts to restrict guns, he argued that if only Jews in Poland had been better armed, many more would have survived the Holocaust.

In the months since the Newtown, Conn., school massacre, some gun rights supporters have repeatedly compared U.S. gun control efforts to Nazi restrictions on firearms, arguing that limiting weapons ownership could leave Americans defenseless against homegrown tyrants.

But some experts say that argument distorts a complex and contrary history. In reality, scholars say, Hitler loosened the tight gun laws that governed Germany after World War I, even as he barred Jews from owning weapons and moved to confiscate them.

Advocates who cite Hitler in the current U.S. debate overlook that Jews in 1930s Germany were a very small population, owned few guns before the Nazis took control, and lived under a dictatorship commanding overwhelming public support and military might, historians say. While it doesn't fit neatly into the modern-day gun debate, they say, the truth is that for all Hitler's unquestionably evil acts, his firearms laws likely made no difference in Jews' very tenuous odds of survival.

More: http://news.yahoo.com/hitler-joins-gun-debate-history-dispute-134324118.html;_ylt=AwrNUbIY5k1ROlQA.53QtDMD

This argument which has been made with regularity on DU is perhaps the most tiresome and dishonest element of the gun extremists argument for why they need unlimited amounts of military-style weapons. Every time you ever see it made aggressively call it out for the true nonsense that it's makers are truly engaged in propagating.