Ben Carson Owes the World an Apology

What has he said lately to make the world a dumber place to live? That without gun control laws, the Holocaust wouldn't have turned out the way it did.
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Why?

Because every time he opens his mouth, he subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge.

What has he said lately to make the world a dumber place to live? That without gun control laws, the Holocaust wouldn't have been so severe. Wolf Blitzer quizzed him on what he meant.

"But just to clarify, if there had been no gun control laws in Europe at that time, would 6 million Jews have been slaughtered?" Blitzer asked.

"I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed," Carson said.

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This is so profoundly ahistorical and moronic it's beyond shameful. Jews in the Warsaw ghetto could barely get enough guns to fight the Nazis -- does he think that there were actually extra hundreds of thousands of guns sitting around in warehouses Jews in the Holocaust could have used if only regulations had been less strict? And even if there were, that European civilianscould have stood up to the might of the Nazi war machine in the crucial first few years of WW II when no army in Europe was able to?

Blitzer was questioning Carson about his new book where he had the ignorant audacity to write:

German citizens were disarmed by their government in the late 1930s, and by the mid-1940s Hitler's regime had mercilessly slaughtered six million Jews and numerous others whom they considered inferior... Through a combination of removing guns and disseminating deceitful propaganda, the Nazis were able to carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance.

Carson doesn't have a clue what really happened from 1933-1945. Most Germans, Jewish or otherwise, didn't have guns to begin with. And German gun laws were already strict before Nazi rule. It was Jews and other "unreliable" citizens who were "disarmed" -- but the chief weapons used against them in Germany were legal. They were progressively stripped of rights and citizenship and placed outside of the law.

The Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were primarily slaughtered outside of Germany: in Poland, the Ukraine, the Baltic countries in extermination camps and by killing squads. Gun control had absolutely nothing to do with their deaths. Carson's just repeating paranoid right-wing revisionist history about Hitler and guns.

People shouldn't be fooled just because Carson doesn't bellow like Trump. He isn't fit to hold any elected office at all if he can blandly make statements like the one he did to Blitzer, and write what he did. Neurosurgeon or not, the man lives in a fantasy world. When confronted by the truth, he dismisses it. In response to his vagaries, the head of the ADL said:

"The small number of personal firearms available to Germany's Jews in 1938 could in no way have stopped the totalitarian power of the Nazi German state. When they had weapons, Jews could symbolically resist, as they did in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and elsewhere, but they could not stop the Nazi genocide machine. In short, gun control did not cause the Holocaust; Nazism and anti-Semitism did."

But Ben Carson waved that off as "foolishness." He's not only dead wrong, he's a bigot.

Lev Raphael is the author of My Germany and 24 other books in many genres.

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