Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson dug in Sunday when asked about his controversial comments linking gun control to the Holocaust.
“It’s not hyperbole at all,” Carson said during an appearance on CBS’ “Face The Nation” when asked about his earlier comments. “Whether it’s on our doorstep or whether it’s 50 years away, it’s still a concern and it’s something that we must guard against.”
“There are a lot of people in the media who will take anything you say and try to make it into hyperbole and try to make it into controversy,” Carson continued. “But the fact of the matter is, when you talk to average American citizens, they know exactly what I’m talking about.”
The controversy has been raging since Thursday, when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer read an excerpt from Carson’s new book, “A More Perfect Union: What We the People Can Do to Reclaim Our Constitutional Liberties.”
“German citizens were disarmed by their government in the late 1930s and by the late 1940s Hitler’s regime had mercilessly slaughtered 6 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,” the book states.
Carson then told Blitzer, “I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.”
On Friday, in response to criticism leveled at Carson’s comments, Fox News commentator Keith Ablow defended the candidate’s stance and took things a step further by saying that the Jews might have avoided the genocide had they more actively resisted the Nazi regime by refusing to turn over their weapons.
“The mindset that Jews surrendered with their guns is far more important than the hardware they turned over: They surrendered the demonstrated intention, at all costs, to resist being deprived of liberty,” Ablow wrote Friday in an op-ed for FoxNews.com.
“If Jews in Germany had more actively resisted the Nazi party or the Nazi regime and had diagnosed it as a malignant and deadly cancer from the start, there would, indeed, have been a chance for the people of that country and the world to be moved to action by their bold refusal to be enslaved,” he continued.
His assertion has drawn rebukes from some opinion writers and commenters on social media, including by Jonathan Greenblatt, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who said the Holocaust has no place in the debate over gun control.
“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,” Greenblatt wrote in a blog published Saturday by the Huffington Post. “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.”
Watch the video of Carson on “Face the Nation” below. His comments about the Holocaust are at the 4:04 mark.