Nazi gun control argument

Dodd was a prosecutor during the post-war Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, and as a senator he sponsored gun control bills that led to creation of the 1968 law.

In a 2000 article, National Rifle Association (NRA) attorney Stephen Halbrook said he was presenting "the first scholarly analysis of the use of gun control laws and policies to establish the Hitler regime and to render political opponents and especially German Jews defenseless.

"[9]: 483 [12]: 403  Other gun rights advocates such as Halbrook, Zelman, and former NRA leader Wayne LaPierre have proposed that Nazi Party policies and laws were an enabling factor in the Holocaust, that prevented its victims from implementing an effective resistance.

[5]: 653–5 [9]: 484 [13]: 87–8, 167–8  Associate professor of criminal justice M. Dyan McGuire wrote in her 2011 book: "It is frequently argued that these laws, which resulted in the confiscation of weapons not belonging to supporters of the Nazis, rendered the Jews and other disfavored groups like the Gypsies, homosexuals, Poles, and their potential allies defenseless and set the stage for the slaughter of the Holocaust that followed.

"[17][18] In October 2015, U.S. Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said that Hitler's mass murder of Jews "would have been greatly diminished" if Germans had not been disarmed by the Nazis.

"[25] Because mainstream scholars argue that gun laws in Germany were already strict prior to Hitler,[2][5][3][26] gun-control advocates may view the hypothesis as a form of reductio ad Hitlerum.

Regarding the "Nazi gun control theory", anthropologist Abigail Kohn wrote in her 2004 book:[2]Such counterfactual arguments are problematic because they reinvent the past to imagine a possible future.

Thus, reimagining a past in which they were and did does not provide a legitimate basis for arguments about what might have followed.In the encyclopedic 2012 book, Guns in American Society, Holocaust scholar Michael Bryant says Halbrook, LaPierre, Zelman, Dave Kopel, and others' "use of history has selected factual inaccuracies, and their methodology can be questioned.

[28] The Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ released a statement saying: "Access to guns and the systematic murder of six million Jews have no basis for comparison in the United States or in New Jersey.