Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea by Joshua Horwitz & Casey Anderson

Author:Joshua Horwitz & Casey Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Page 137 →

CHAPTER SIX

THE RISE OF THE THIRD REICH

“Loyalty to the Fatherland required disloyalty to the Republic.”

adage among the German Right in the 1920s

“I love my country but fear my government”

bumper sticker in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century

German Gun Laws and the Holocaust

“How can anyone support gun control after what Hitler did to the Jews?” What began several years ago as a throwaway line used by gun rights activists to suggest that perhaps European Jews could have organized themselves to resist the Nazis if they had been better armed has become a fully elaborated revisionist theory of the history of the Holocaust. One gun rights group, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, is dedicated specifically to promoting the idea that Jews have the most to lose if private ownership of firearms is regulated or restricted because persecuted minorities cannot count on the government to protect them. Any government, the story goes, might well be hijacked by anti-Semites bent on exterminating the Jews. The group's logo is a Star of David flanked by a musket on one side and an assault weapon on the other, and its motto is “America's Most Aggressive Defender of Firearms Ownership.”1

The alleged link between gun control and genocide is now a staple of Page 138 → gun rights advocacy. Gun rights blogs are replete with calls to remember that the “first thing Hitler did was to take the guns from the people.”2 In Guns, Freedom, and Terrorism, Wayne LaPierre claims that firearm registration paved the way for the Holocaust.3 In a later book, The Global War on Your Guns, he maintains that gun control laws have enabled governments to murder 169 million of their own citizens. “If every family on this planet owned a good-quality rifle, genocide would be on the path to extinction,” he asserts.4

Of course, for someone who believes that gun rights are essential to the prevention of genocide, extremism in defense of an absolutist vision of those rights is no vice. For the activists who transformed the National Rifle Association (NRA) from a moderate group representing the interests of sportsmen into an intensely partisan and ideological organization in the mid-1970s, the standard interest-group model of negotiating with opponents to try to find common ground is simply unacceptable. Former NRA lobbyist Richard Feldman's tell-all book, Ricochet: Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist, relates how, as early as 1969, Harlan Carter, the father of the modern NRA, “compared the growing gun control movement [and specifically the Gun Control Act of 1968] to the confiscatory actions of Nazi Germany that permitted only a privileged few like Hermann Goering to own firearms and hunt.”5

Carter and his allies had no patience for the earlier generation of NRA leaders, who at one point endorsed a ban on cheap handguns as a means of limiting the impact of gun violence. After all, when the stakes are as high as stopping state-sponsored mass murder, nothing can be allowed to stand in the way. As discussed in

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