OPINION:
Alaska’s Republican congressman, Don Young, suggested during a speech that touched on gun control that if Jews during Adolf Hitler days in Germany had been armed, they wouldn’t have been put in the ovens and killed.
His words, predictably enough, generated outcry among the snowflakes on the left. But why? Tyrants and dictators hate guns in the hands of their citizenry for a reason. That’s just common sense.
Young made the remark while speaking before the Alaska Municipal League and fielding a question about gun control from Democrat Dimitri Shein, who’s running for Young’s congressional seat.
His thoughts?
Young said, the Daily Mail reported: “How many Jews were put in the ovens because they were unarmed?”
That’s been a question that’s been posed and pondered on previous occasions — always to the utter disgust of the gun-controlling left. But facts are facts.
And facts are that Germany’s Weimar Republic started a gun registry in the 1920s, which was then used by Nazis to exert greater controls for evil purposes against Jews.
From the National Review: “In 1933, the ultimate extremist group, led by Adolf Hitler, seized power and used the [registry] records to identify, disarm, and attack political opponents and Jews. Constitutional rights were suspends, and mass searches for and seizures of guns and dissident publications ensued. Police revoked gun license of Social Democrats and others who were not ’politically reliable.’ ’’
A few years later, Hitler ushered in the Gun Control Act; following, Jews were ordered to give the government all their firearms. And following that: The Night of the Broken Glass.
Stephen Halbrook, a research fellow with the Independent Institute, wrote similarly in his “Gun Control in the Third Reich” book.
“A skeptic could surmise that a better-armed populace might have made no difference,” the Independent Institute wrote, citing Halbrook’s work, “but the National Socialist regime certainly did not think so — it ruthlessly suppressed firearm ownership by disfavored groups.”
The left likes to pooh-pooh any suggestion that firearms serve as surefire citizenry defenses against government encroachments on individual liberties, preferring instead to insist such ideas are tin-foil hat conspiracies. But history’s clear. When dictators want to dictate, they do so best when the citizens are defenseless.
Maybe guns wouldn’t have saved all the Jews from Hitler’s savagery and murder. But they would’ve saved some.
They would’ve given a bit of a fighting chance to at least some gun-owning Jews. And if the left’s all about the idea that “saving just one person” is reason enough to enact regulations, well then, that door swings both ways.
The idea that just one individual who legally owns a gun might be able to save self or another by fighting off an attacker ought to be cause to keep the Second Amendment strong.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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