From The BBC
9th October 2015
US Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson has sparked controversy after suggesting the Holocaust may have been avoided if people had been armed. "The likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed," he told CNN on Thursday. An anti-Semitism monitoring group says linking US gun control to the Holocaust is "historically inaccurate". Mr Carson is polling second in the Republican race behind Donald Trump. The retired neurosurgeon drew condemnation last month for saying a Muslim should not run for president because Islam was inconsistent with the US constitution.
During the CNN interview, Mr Carson was asked about part of his new book, A More Perfect Union, where he wrote "through a combination of removing guns and disseminating propaganda, the Nazis were able to carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance". He was then asked by CNN presenter Wolf Blitzer: "Just clarify, if there had been no gun control laws in Europe at that time, would six million Jews have been slaughtered?" Mr Carson said he doubted Hitler would have been able to achieve his goals if Germans had been armed at that time. "I'm telling you that there is a reason that these dictatorial people take the guns first," he added.
The Anti-Defamation League, an anti-Semitism monitoring group, has previously said that drawing comparisons between the gun control debate in the US and the Holocaust was "historically inaccurate and offensive", especially to Holocaust survivors and their families. In 1943, armed Jews in the Warsaw ghetto fought the Nazis. Jews killed about 20 Nazis, but about 13,000 Jews died in the uprising.
Ben Carson's comments come days after a mass shooting at a college in the US state of Oregon, in which nine people were killed. Speaking after the attack, Mr Carson said: "I would not just stand there and let him shoot me. I would say, hey, guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can't get us all." Survivors and relatives of gun attacks in the US have described his comments as insensitive. Mr Carson has defended gun rights as a bulwark against government tyranny and said that mass shootings are a mental health issue.
[Ah, the sound of people who know nothing about history and who have a tenuous relationship with reality. If Jews in Germany had carried handguns, rifles and shotguns during the Holocaust they would have been able to fight off the combined might of the German armed forces who conquered the vast part of Northern and Western Europe in a matter of months handily beating every army they faced. Really? With no training, no logistics, no heavy weapons and (probably) no co-ordination they could have beaten the best equipped and most effective fighting force on the planet? I suggest that the outcome might have been quite different. Also, if armed citizens exist to counter-balance the States military capability I don’t think Mr Carson has been keeping up with developments. I’m sorry, but this isn’t 1776 or even 1789 anymore. A citizen army would be useless against any kind of organised military response today. But then the US gun lobby do like their myths…..]
2 comments:
I know! These specious arguments have those lacking critical thinking or reading skills, lapping up everything he says! If you try to point out the inaccuracies in their arguments, they attack you. I am astounded when yet another person I know falls victim to him, Trump, or any of the other nuts who want to run this country. It's frightening, it's like their numbers multiply daily. These people honestly believe more guns will make us safer. When you point out we have more guns, fewer restrictions on owning those guns than other countries, and we have ridiculously more gun related deaths, and ask how they can believe that, they say, if we're all armed, criminals will think twice about starting something, or the public will stop the criminal. When you point out that no armed civilian in the last thirty years has ever stopped a mass shooting, and that even when armed individuals were present they either didn't, couldn't or consciously wouldn't intervene, they don't believe you. Facts don't matter to these people. It makes me want to scream!
What little debate seems to be going on is not about facts. I don't think that the pro-gun lobby really care about them. They have beliefs which they'll fight for which cannot be countered by pointing to inconvenient things like statistics, history or other cultures. They're right - end of 'argument'.
Oh, and one of the funniest things I've heard in years was that apparently Europe isn't really 'free' because we don't have the right to have guns - probably because we don't feel the need to have such a 'right'. Odd that.... [grin]
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