Pathetic rag The Raw Story on Mike Huckabee on Obama and guns:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) declared on Wednesday that President Barack Obama and gun control advocates are possibly planning on confiscating the nation’s privately owned firearms and imposing a Nazi Germany-like “dictatorship” in this country. According to Media Matters, Huckabee made the remarks in response to a caller on his radio show.

“I’m very concerned,” said the caller, “it seems like there’s so many people who have not read and do not understand how quickly Germany was turned into, it was a democracy, then turned into a dictatorship by everyone having to register their guns and then they went door to door and collected them.”

Rather than correct the caller that in 1938, the Nazi Party loosened gun regulations that had been imposed by the Versailles Treaty in the wake of World War One, lowered the age limit for gun ownership and de-regulated the possession of shotguns and rifles for everyone but Jews, Huckabee chose instead to stoke the caller’s fears.

“People do forget that,” said Huckabee. “And by the way, know that when you bring that up you get people who get crazy on us, and they’ll start saying, ‘Oh there you go comparing to the Nazis.’ And I understand the reaction, but it’s the truth. You cannot take people’s rights away if they’re resisting and if they have the means to resist, but once they’re disarmed and the people who are trying to take over have all the power, not just political, not just financial, but they have the physical power to domesticate us and to subjugate us to their will, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it other than just plan to die in the course of resistance.”

I’m delighted that Raw Story brought up this issue about correcting the record.  No, not correcting Mike Huckabee, but correcting this unserious Harcourt study.  The comprehensive study by Stephen Halbrook is much more honest, and points out that at least the following weapons features were banned for everyone: silencers, tactical lights on weapons, detachable high capacity magazines (more than five rounds) and telescoping stocks.  Does this list sound familiar?  Halbrook also remarks concerning Nazi gun control:

… the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was consolidated by massive searches and seizures of firearms from political opponents, who were invariably described as “communists.” After five years of repression and eradication of dissidents, Hitler signed a new gun control law in 1938, which benefitted Nazi party members and entities, but denied firearm ownership to enemies of the state.

As I’ve said before, no one has ever claimed that Nazi gun regulations didn’t benefit the totalitarians in Nazi Germany.  Someone always has the guns.  The issue is who, and under what circumstances, and for what purpose?

That Harcourt would publish such an unserious study is embarrassing for him whether he knows it or not.  It’s probably not possible for The Raw Story to be embarrassed about anything.  But take careful note of the argument that is repeated in the silly article.    It’s not really gun control if it only affected the Jews.  Can you imagine a more racist, bigoted position than that?

Prior:

Obama, Hitler And Gun Control

Hitler Joins The Gun Control Debate

I see that use of the search words “Hitler Gun Control” has recently become popular.  Of course it has.  And this is an easy question to answer.  The former assault weapons ban and the proposed assault weapons ban find their roots in Nazi Germany, as I have pointed out before.

This comprehensive study shows that Hitler’s Nazi Germany prohibited at least the following things: silencers, tactical lights on weapons, high capacity magazines (more than five rounds) and telescoping stocks.

The Obama administration.  Following the lead of Nazi Germany since January 20, 2009.

UPDATE #1: This is rich.  Alex Seitz-Wald writing with Salon has penned a piece entitled The Hitler Gun Control Lie.  Let’s examine just a bit of it.

This week, people were shocked when the Drudge Report posted a giant picture of Hitler over a headline speculating that the White House will proceed with executive orders to limit access to firearms. The proposed orders are exceedingly tame, but Drudge’s reaction is actually a common conservative response to any invocation of gun control.

The NRA, Fox News, Fox News (again), Alex Jones, email chains, Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher, Gun Owners of America, etc., all agree that gun control was critical to Hitler’s rise to power. Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (“America’s most aggressive defender of firearms ownership”) is built almost exclusively around this notion, popularizing posters of Hitler giving the Nazi salute next to the text: “All in favor of ‘gun control’ raise your right hand.”

In his 1994 book, NRA head Wayne LaPierre dwelled on the Hitler meme at length, writing: “In Germany, Jewish extermination began with the Nazi Weapon Law of 1938, signed by Adolf Hitler.”

And it makes a certain amount of intuitive sense: If you’re going to impose a brutal authoritarian regime on your populace, better to disarm them first so they can’t fight back.

Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone’s guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn’t make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute.

University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler’s, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.

The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote.

What happens next would be amusing if it wasn’t such a horrible train wreck.

Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.  The law did prohibit Jews and other persecuted classes from owning guns, but this should not be an indictment of gun control in general.

Alex acknowledges that his interpretation might be a bit problematic, and then in the span of two sentences, he demolishes his own argument.  More to the point, and again referring to the paper I cited above (Stephen P. Halbrook, Nazi Firearms Laws And The Disarming Of The German Jews):

… the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was consolidated by massive searches and seizures of firearms from political opponents, who were invariably described as “communists.” After five years of repression and eradication of dissidents, Hitler signed a new gun control law in 1938, which benefitted Nazi party members and entities, but denied firearm ownership to enemies of the state.

Alex treats the disarming of “enemies of the state” as worthy of honorable mention as a stipulation to his argument just so that you know he is really scholarly and hasn’t completely ignored the real facts.  We know it to be the primary and fundamental point of the argument.  It’s the hinge upon which the entire conversation turns.  Leave it to a Fascist to overlook that point.

UPDATE #2: Thoughts from Michael Bane.