Sunday, February 3, 2019

Fake Quotes on Gun Control Attributed to National Socialists


This blog post by American academic in media studies, Professor Randall Bytwerk, on fake and apocryphal quotes often attributed to leading figures in the National Socialist movement, is worth reading:


I've cited it before in my own study of another often quoted apocryphal Hitler quotation.

The fake quote the readers' attention is directed to this time is this one used to support the claim that the National Socialist regime was an advocate of gun control (thus apparently making anyone who supports gun control laws in America a "Nazi"):

This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!

As usual, nobody has ever come up with an authenticated primary source reference for this fake quote. It is often cited by American right-wing gun lobby groups who like to suggest that if only gun laws had been more libertarian in Weimar Germany, the National Socialists might have been prevented from rising to power by an armed peoples' militia.

Do these people know what they are wishing for? Are they truly suggesting that if only the Communist Party militia, the Red Front Fighters' League (Roter Frontkämpferbund), had free access to a nice stash of guns that the Communists would have used armed people power to storm the Reichstag and wrest power from Hitler? Workers of the world unite, you having to lose but your chains?



I am sure that very thought would be enough to make Republican NRA supporters want to vote for gun control laws in the name of conservative Law & Order. Likewise with the thought of American Black Panthers forming an armed militia:



As for Hitler, once in power, he liberalised gun laws.

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