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Carson calls ADL response to gun/Holocaust remarks ‘total foolishness’

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson on Friday pushed back against Jewish criticism of comments he made on Thursday that Jews could’ve been saved from persecution by the Nazis in Europe were they allowed to carry armed-guns by law.
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October 9, 2015

This post originally appeared at Jewish Insider.

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson on Friday pushed back against Jewish criticism of comments he made on Thursday that Jews could’ve been saved from persecution by the Nazis in Europe were they allowed to carry armed-guns by law.

“I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed,” Carson said in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. “There’s a reason these dictatorial people take the guns first.”

Carson was immediately called out by The Anti-Defamation League (ADL). “Ben Carson has a right to his views on gun control, but the notion that Hitler’s gun-control policy contributed to the Holocaust is historically inaccurate,” Jonathan Greenblatt, ADL’s National Director, said in a statement. “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.”

In an appearance on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Friday morning, Carson called Greenblatt’s response “total foolishness.”

“I’d be happy to discuss that in depth with anybody. But it is well known that in many places where tyranny has taken over, they first disarmed the people. There’s a reason that they disarm people. They don’t just do it arbitrarily,” he told host George Stephanopoulos.

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