Guns, the NRA and the Holocaust

The National Rifle Association has always relied on the technique of the “Big Lie” to radicalize its supporters. The concept is that if one expresses an untruth long enough, it eventually becomes reality. The idea of the Big Lie was practiced long before the internet, social media and “Alternative Facts” entered the public domain. Now that they have, it is so much easier to convince through deceit,

One of the biggest lies spread by the NRA is that the Nazi extermination of European Jewry occurred because Hitler disarmed the Jews. This belief is so entrenched in their mythology that even some Jewish gun-owners buy into it. While it makes excellent propaganda and sounds logical, it is patently false. It displays not only a marked ignorance of how the Holocaust came about but also ignores the realities of the Jewish experience in Christian Europe.

The Nazis didn’t disarm the Jews because the Jews as an entity weren’t armed to begin with, either in Germany or anywhere else in Europe. The Jewish population of that time and place consisted mostly of middle-class shop-keepers, professionals, and intellectuals; not exactly the militia types. And they were a minority that wanted most of all to fit in and not cause trouble. “Don’t make waves” and “Don’t rock the boat” were Judaic thought patterns ingrained from having been persecuted by their Christian neighbors for 2000 years. Barely tolerated and always on tenuous ground, European Jewry wasn’t about to increase its visibility by arming to the teeth. Plus, obedience to authority had always been a Germanic trait and the German Jews were no exception. Tragically, it was their willingness to meekly obey the Nazis, not their alleged disarmament that sealed their downfall. They literally cooperated in their own annihilation.

The Nazis were clever enough to hide the true nature of the Final Solution from their victims. They told the Jews that they were merely being “resettled” somewhere further east, presumably in villages of their own, far away from the gentile population. Seeing that they had suffered through centuries of being resettled, expelled, pogromed and ethnically cleaned from one corner of Europe to another, the Jews eagerly believed this ruse. For them, it was the latest chapter in the same old story. And so they packed their bags and quietly made for the train station. Resistance was not even considered. The Jews had never fought back against oppression, opting for their age-old tactics of endurance and survival. Had the Jews resisted violently, Hitler would have loved it. It would have proved to him that they were indeed a threat, giving the Nazis an excuse to snuff them out of existence with their ample war machine. Some Jews eventually did arm themselves, but only as members of partisan combat units.

Another NRA falsehood is that Hitler gained power because he disarmed the German people. Not true. 1930s Germany differed from 2018 America. It was not a rabid gun-culture and military assault weapons were unobtainable to civilians (unless they worked for the crime syndicates.) But the German population was not as completely disarmed as the gun lobby likes to pretend. There are many war records noting that Allied airmen bailing out over enemy airspace feared being shot to death by German farmers armed with shotguns.

Besides which, the Germans didn’t need to be disarmed. They loved Adolph Hitler for the same reason Trump’s base adores him. He appealed to their darker tribal and nationalistic instincts. If you look at any photograph of a Nazi rally, the participants are alive with enthusiasm, like teenagers at a Justin Bieber concert.

So invoking the Holocaust to justify the Second Amendment is a cheap and inaccurate ploy. Were the Founding Fathers to view a future of American schoolchildren being slaughtered in their classrooms, these intelligent men would have rewritten, if not scrapped the amendment. I am no bleeding heart liberal who faints at the sight of a gun. But I would think that after nearly two decades of mass murder in our schools, the NRA would wise up and make common sense concessions. Instead, they still divide the country into “Law Abiding Citizens” and “Criminals” (which in the eyes of their mostly white membership translates as “Dark-skinned People.”) And while it is true that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people;” assault weapons like the notorious AR-15 make killing so much easier. How many more kids do we need to bury before they wake up to this fact?

�$Uye�