Calling someone a Nazi, or comparing them to Adolf Hitler, was once the last resort of a person losing an argument. Branding someone a Nazi is now the first resort of those who seek to avoid arguments, and it is often bundled with calls for more gun control. Seldom, if ever, is that demand accompanied by facts about actual Nazi policies on firearms.
Gun control advocates seem to believe that National Socialist Germany boasted gun stores on every corner selling Mausers to the masses at a discount. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As Stephen P. Halbrook shows in Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming Jews and “Enemies of the State,” now available in a new edition, Germany maintained no right to keep and bear arms comparable to America’s Second Amendment. According to the National Socialists, nobody needed a firearm for self-defense. The Nazi government also determined that sport shooting and hunting were not legitimate needs.
The Nazis wanted the names of those who owned firearms, and they found them in the registration records of the Weimar Republic. Jews were a primary target, so consider the fate of Alfred Flatow, an Olympic medalist for Germany in 1896. In 1932, Flatow complied with the Weimar government and registered three handguns. In 1938, the Nazis arrested him for possession of firearms. In December 1942, Flatow died of starvation in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Those fond of calling people Nazis fail to account for National Socialist policies in the nations they invaded and occupied. Those can be found in Halbrook’s Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance, also recently released in a new edition. As in Germany, the Nazis exploited the gun registration records imposed by Prime Minister Pierre Laval in 1935.
The Nazis, then allied with Stalin’s Soviet Union, invaded France in May 1940. Under the Nazi occupation, all firearms and radio transmitters had to be surrendered, and even those who failed to denounce gun owners were subject to execution. The occupying military forces became the most prominent “active shooters.”
On June 10, 1944, in the village of Oradour-sur-Glane, Nazi forces gunned down 196 men, including seven Jewish refugees. The attack also claimed the lives of 245 women and 207 children, including six infants. A disarmed populace, Halbrook explains, is “more susceptible to totalitarian rule and is less able to resist oppression.” Or as the late P. J. O’Rourke put it, this is what happens when the people with all the power have all the guns.
Those quick with the Nazi charge could take a lesson from Hans-Jurgen Massaquoi, author of Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany. The author recalls the Kristallnacht of Nov. 9, 1938, when Nazi thugs destroyed more than 1,000 Jewish places of worship, killed 91 Jews, and arrested some 30,000 others.
“In their many bloody clashes for dominance in Germany,” Massaquoi explains, “the Nazis and Commies were virtually indistinguishable. Both were totalitarians, ever ready to brutalize to crush resistance to their respective ideologies.” Those who now wield the Nazi accusation might also recall the men who actually fought them.
They fought at Monte La Difensa, Anzio, and on the Normandy beaches. They liberated the Nazi death camps, where “conditions of indescribable horror” shook future president Dwight Eisenhower to the core. On April 12, 1945, troops of Canada’s Eighth Reconnaissance Regiment (motto: “first in, last out”) liberated the Westerbork transit camp, from which the Nazis sent thousands of Jews to Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Theresienstadt, where Alfred Flatow perished.
As the liberators would understand, there is no parallel between a National Socialist dictatorship and a constitutional republic with free elections. Even under a duly elected president a lot of people don’t like, there is no parallel with National Socialism. Calling people you don’t like Nazis is justification for deadly violence against them. Donald Trump survived two assassination attempts, and Charlie Kirk, who invited people to “prove me wrong” in open debate, has now been shot dead.
The horrific act of a depraved criminal does not justify new restrictions on Second Amendment rights. As Americans should know, there’s news on that front from Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for Civil Rights, who is now cracking down on campus antisemitism.
“Every day there are civil rights violations that come across our desk, and we have to prioritize our resources and figure out how to deal with them,” Dhillon explains. “The other thing that’s novel, we’re forming a Second Amendment section of the Civil Rights Division. That’s never been done before.”
Lloyd Billingsley is a policy fellow at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif.