Nevada Republican Danny Tarkanian, who is running for Congress, said last week that the Armenian genocide wouldn't have happened without gun control.
"I happen to understand that the first thing Hitler did before he herded the Jews into concentration camps to kill them was he passed, I believe in '38, a law that said no Jew could own a gun," conservative radio host Wayne Allyn Root said to Tarkanian in an interview on March 27, according to HuffPost.
"In the end you're powerless and defenseless if you have no gun."
Tarkanian, who has unsuccessfully run for office several times, replied that the Holocaust was simply "history repeating itself," noting that "I'm Armenian, and the Ottoman Empire ― they took the guns from the Armenians. They came and they killed 1.5 million of the 2 million that were there because they had no way to defend themselves."
Root and Tarkanian echo Republicans like Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson and Alaska Rep. Don Young, who blamed gun control for contributing to the Holocaust.
"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 on CNN in October, 2015. "I'm telling you there is a reason these dictatorial people take guns first.
HuffPost reported in February that Young said at a conference, "How many millions of people were shot and killed because they were unarmed? Fifty million in Russia, because their citizens weren't armed. How many Jews were put in the ovens because they were unarmed?"
Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the New York Daily News after Young's comment that "it is mind-bending to suggest that personal firearms in the hands of the small number of Germany's Jews (about 214,000 remaining in Germany in 1938) could have stopped the totalitarian onslaught of Nazi Germany when the armies of Poland, France, Belgium and numerous other countries were overwhelmed by the Third Reich."
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