The Republicans have been painfully tone-deaf when it comes to the issue of gun control, especially after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting. Fourteen students and three staff died, 14 more were wounded. So many of the GOP accept donations to their campaigns and “A” ratings from the National Rifle Association (NRA). Now, one of them has made a complete fool of himself.
Congressman Don Young (R-AK) unabashedly linked the Holocaust to gun control at an Alaska Municipal League conference in Juneau, the capital of his northern state, according to The Alaska Report:
‘How many millions of people were shot and killed because they were unarmed? Fifty million in Russia. How many Jews were put in the ovens because they were unarmed?’
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Young’s numbers were way off:
‘The best estimates of the number of victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, including the killing center at Auschwitz-Birkenau, between 1940 and 1945 are: Jews (1,095,000 deported to Auschwitz, of whom 960,000 died); Poles (147,000 deported, of whom 74,000 died); Roma (23,000 deported, of whom 21,000 died); Soviet prisoners of war (15,000 deported and died); and other nationalities (25,000 deported, of whom 12,000 died).’
Dimitri Shein, a Democrat from Anchorage, is running for Young’s seat, and he was at Young’s speech. He asked the lawmaker about school safety, and that started Young on his Holocaust rant. The Alaskan lawmaker has been a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association (NRA) for years.
Young brought a wacko theory into the argument against gun control. He claimed that gun control was responsible for Hitler’s Third Reich’s terrible rampage through Europe and elsewhere. The theory has run wild in gun-rights advocates circles for a couple of years.
In 2015, when Ben Carson was running for president, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer questioned him about this crazy theory, according to the Alaska Report:
‘–So what is your point: If there had been guns in Germany, there might not have been a Holocaust?’
Now the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Donald Trump administration, Carson came back with an angry response:
‘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.’
This nutty Republican premise failed to take into account the fact that, despite a 1938 Nazi law that refused Jews the right to own weapons, many fought back in the armed Jewish resistance.
For example, Dr. Jerzy Hauptmann heroically served in the Polish underground, fighting to free people from the Nazi invasion when he was a young man. Later, he immigrated to the U.S. and became dean of a Missouri university graduate school named after him and an international speaker on public affairs.
The USHMM consisted of:
‘Jewish civilians offered armed resistance in over 100 ghettos in occupied Poland and the Soviet Union. In April-May 1943, Jews in the Warsaw (Poland) ghetto rose in armed revolt after rumors that the Germans would deport the remaining ghetto inhabitants to the Treblinka killing center.’
In spite of those efforts, the Nazi’s sent Zbigniew Gliniecki’s family and many other Polish families to the gulags in Russia, where his younger twin siblings perished.
The Anti-Defamation League condemned the ludicrous NRA-promoted theory that Jewish citizens would have been able to halt the powerful Third Reich with their own weapons, when all of Europe’s military power failed.
Of course, Young believes that teachers should be armed with guns to solve the problem of gun violence. As Archie Bunker said in the 1970’s television show, All In The Family, the way to solve terrorists from highjacking airplanes was to give every passenger a gun.
Would the kindergartner’s get pink and blue firearms, too, in Young’s world? The lawmaker blamed video games and the breakdown of families for school violence. Right.
Featured Image via MSNBC Producer of The Last Word, Kyle Griffin’s, Twitter Page.
