While pundits of the right will attempt to rewrite history for their audience by using Hitler’s Nazi Weapon Law of 1938 to substantiate claims that gun regulation either equates to totalitarianism or is a slippery slope to it, the truth is actually the exact opposite.
Many forget that the Weimar Republic, the government in Germany during the time right before Hitler’s reign, actually had stricter gun laws than that of the Nazi regime. Following the defeat of the German empire in World War I, German lawmakers carried out strict surrender terms in an effort to follow the guidelines of the newly founded Treaty of Versailles. In 1919, Germany legislated an effective ban on all private firearms and even confiscated guns that were already owned by private citizens. By 1928, the Reichstag had ended up relaxing on the regulations but enacted a registration program requiring separate permits to own, carry, or sell firearms.
When Hitler brought in the 1938 Weapon Law, he wanted more Aryans to be part of the Nazi Party, so the law actually deregulated the transfer and acquisition of guns, lowered the age of gun ownership to 18 and extended the length of gun permits from one to three years long.
The part about the law that conservative gun owners seem to dwell on is that the right to own guns was taken away from Jews — and there were a lot of Jews. And, according to these same types of gun owners, if Jews had guns in Nazi Germany, they could have fought back and won. Interestingly enough, an example of when a large group of Jewish people fought back with guns during WWII exists in the historical record of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Poland wherein around 13,000 Jews were killed, contrasting with 17 Germany military fatalities.
Gun-rights advocates in America have a long history of comparing gun control to Nazi Germany. It seems like the easiest argument to them, but clearly they have their WWII stories conflated a little too much with holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists to entirely understand the difference between Hitler’s gun control and Obama’s. That’s probably because, if the gun-rights advocate is a constitutionalist libertarian, virtually ANY type of restriction on the right to keep and bear arms is unconstitutional and therefore illegal… and therefore tyrannical. What they forget is, to become a dictatorship, you need a dictator and dictators are still politicians who rely on public support.
Hitler didn’t become head honcho just by giving orders, he worked his way through politics by rallying supporters and got around 13 million votes during the 1932 German Presidential Election, which was around 30% of the voter pool.
So, is there really enough public support for an all-out gun ban? The short of it is a resounding “No” but what’s more important is that not many people are calling for gun bans. In another article, I explored the possibility of making guns illegal to own, and I bet there are a whole lot of bloggers out there writing similar things, but that doesn’t represent the major consensus on gun control in America. In fact, most people in the discussion are calling for background checks.
With so many people in support of keeping gun ownership alive and considering background checks as a form of enforcing responsible gun ownership, how exactly is this like Nazi Germany again?