A gun-loving Alaska congressman suggested that Jews might not have perished in the Holocaust if they had been armed, according to reports.
“How many millions of people were shot and killed because they were unarmed? Fifty million in Russia,” Rep. Don Young said during a meeting in Juneau on Thursday, according to KTOO.
“How many Jews were put in the ovens because they were unarmed?” added the 84-year-old Republican, who has represented the state in Congress since 1973.
Dimitri Shein — an Anchorage Democrat running for Young’s seat — was at the Alaska Municipal League meeting when he asked the longtime NRA board member what could be done to prevent school shootings.
Young said he favors allowing teachers to carry guns, an idea President Trump has been promoting since the Feb. 14 school massacre in Florida.
Invoking the Holocaust and the Nazi regime’s 1938 ban on Jews owning weapons is a common tactic employed by opponents of gun control, according to the Forward, a news outlet for American Jews.
The Anti-Defamation League has said it was preposterous to argue that Jews could have defeated the Third Reich with personal firearms.
ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt wrote in 2015 that the “historical second-guessing is deeply offensive to Jews, Holocaust survivors and those who valiantly fought against Hitler during World War II.
“It is, in fact, as many historians have previously noted, a distortion of history itself,” he added.
In 2015, then-presidential candidate Ben Carson also defended gun ownership in the US by suggesting that that the Holocaust might have been prevented if Jews had been armed.CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer asked the former neurosurgeon: “What is the point you are trying to make? If there were guns in Germany, there might not have been a Holocaust?”
Carson, now the US secretary of Housing and Urban Development, answered: “That was only one of the countries I mentioned. There were a number of countries where tyranny reigns and before it happened they disarmed the people.”
He added: “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.”