WATCH: Congressman Says Jews Died In Holocaust Because They Didn’t Have Guns
Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) has served in Congress since 1973. Image by Pete Marovich/Getty Images
By Aiden Pink February 28, 2018
A member of Congress argued against gun control last week by arguing that Jews died in the Holocaust because they were unarmed.
Rep. Don Young, a Republican who has represented the entire state of Alaska in Congress since 1973, made his comments at a town hall in Juneau on Thursday.
Dmitri Shein, a Democrat who is running for Young’s seat, asked him what municipalities and the federal government could do to prevent school shootings.
Young replied that he believed teachers should be armed in schools. He then invoked what he saw as lessons from World War II.
“How many millions of people were shot and killed because they were unarmed? Fifty million in Russia, because their citizens weren’t armed,” Young said. “How many Jews were put into the ovens because they were unarmed?”
Invoking the Holocaust — specifically the Nazi regime’s 1938 ban on Jews owning weapons — is a tactic frequently used by of opponents of gun control like the National Rifle Association. The Anti-Defamation League has frequently called out such tactics, with national director Jonathan Greenblatt writing in 2015 that the comparison “is deeply offensive to Jews, Holocaust survivors and those who valiantly fought against Hitler during World War II. It is, in fact, as many historians have previously noted, a distortion of history itself.”
Young, a longtime board member of the NRA, also argued that much of the violence seen in schools in recent years could be tied to violent video games.
Contact Aiden Pink at pink@forward.com or on Twitter, @aidenpink
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
