Opponents of gun control often state that past
totalitarian regimes passed gun control legislation, which was later followed by confiscation, with
Fascist Italy and
Nazi Germany during
World War II, as well as some
communist states being cited as examples. They often cite the example of the Nazi regime, claiming that once the Nazis had taken and consolidated their power, they proceeded to implement gun control laws to disarm the population and wipe out the opposition, and the genocide of disarmed Jews, gypsies, and other "undesirables" followed.
Historians have pointed out, however, that the preceding democratic
Weimar Republic already had restrictive gun laws, which were actually liberalised by the Nazis when they came to power. According to the Weimar Republic 1928
Law on Firearms & Ammunition, firearms acquisition or carrying permits were “only to be granted to persons of undoubted reliability, and—in the case of a firearms carry permit—only if a demonstration of need is set forth.” The Nazis replaced this law with the
Weapons Law of March 18, 1938, which was very similar in structure and wording, but relaxed gun control requirements for the general population. This relaxation included the exemption from regulation of all weapons and ammunition except
handguns, the extension of the range of persons exempt from the permit requirement, and the lowering of the age for acquisition of firearms from 20 to 18. It did, however, prohibit manufacturing of firearms and ammunition by
Jews.Shortly thereafter, in the additional
Regulations Against Jews' Possession of Weapons of November 11, 1938, Jews were forbidden from possession of any weapons at all.
Holocaust survivor,
Abraham H. Foxman, the National Director of the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has stated in 2013: “The idea that supporters of gun control are doing something akin to what Hitler’s Germany did to strip citizens of guns in the run-up to the Second World War is historically inaccurate and offensive, especially to Holocaust survivors and their families.” The ADL states that there were probably only about 214,000 Jews in Germany in 1938, and they could not have stopped the Nazi "
genocide machine." They claim that "Gun control did not cause the Holocaust; Nazism and
anti-Semitism did."
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_control This is not an endorsement of the Nazis, just wanted to point out that the comparison to current events is lame