Holocaust - Delaware Democrats Deny Gun Control Played a Part

One of Delaware’s most outspoken lawmakers is in some hot water after he stated gun control could lead to tyranny and a Holocaust-like event in Delaware.

On Tuesday, one day after International Holocaust Remembrance Day, both chambers passed a resolution marking the occasion, which coincides with the liberation of the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp. Holocaust survivor and current Delaware resident Ann Jaffe also spoke before legislators, sharing her bone-chilling story as a child in Nazi-occupied Poland.

After she finished relaying her experience, several senators stood to thank her and share their thoughts on the Holocaust or stories about family members who lived through it. Among those who spoke was Sen. Dave Lawson, a Marydel Republican, who warned the chamber about the dangers of gun control. The Polish partisans Ms. Jaffe described as helping save her family were only able to do so because
they were armed, he said, describing gun restrictions as one of the potential precursors to genocide.

“The Holocaust, we can’t even imagine, can’t begin to imagine, and for we in this chamber to think that this can’t happen here, that is absolutely a fool’s errand. It can,” he said, the chamber silent as a tomb.

“When we continue to take away the rights, we continue to work on disarming our population, our legally owned firearms, taking away and continue to encroach on that … We continue this path that we’re taking, please don’t forget that everything that Hitler did was legal.

“Murdering those people was legal. Disarming those people was legal. Do we want to follow that same path? Because I’m telling you, from where I sit, it’s not that far away.”

After he concluded, one person sitting in the gallery began to clap, prompting Lt. Gov. Bethany Hall-Long to interrupt. While no one commented on it on the Senate floor, it didn’t take long for criticism to begin pouring in.

Rep. Debra Heffernan, a Bellefonte Democrat, in a statement said she was “beyond horrified and appalled” and called for him to apologize.

“Sen. Lawson took that horrifying recounting of surviving a genocide, and while Ms. Jaffe was still in the chamber, tried to turn her somber words into a Second Amendment argument,” Rep. Heffernan, who is Jewish, said in part. “As elected officials, our words matter. Our words carry weight, and we have to be conscious of that at all times. The Holocaust is still a deeply painful topic for millions of Jews worldwide, regardless of whether they were alive during it.”

Democratic Party Chairman Erik Raser-Schramm in a statement said the remarks “suggest either a primitive understanding of the horrific forces that led to the Nazi slaughter of 6 million Jews, or a sinister motive to pervert history to fit his hard-line narrative on gun.” Attorney General Kathy Jennings, a Democrat, also joined the chorus calling for Sen. Lawson to apologize.

He has not done so.

The senator made or shared several Facebook posts on Thursday and Friday urging Americans to remember the Holocaust, learn from the past and stand by their convictions.

Although the argument is a relatively common trope among opponents of gun control, it is mostly rejected by historians and scholars. In a 2015 op-ed in The New York Times, University of Vermont professor Alan E. Steinweis, who specializes in the Third Reich and the Holocaust, described the claim as “strangely ahistorical, a classic instance of injecting an issue that is important in our place and time into a historical situation where it was not seen as important.”

While the Nazis did pass laws forbidding Jews from having guns a few years after they gained power, far more important to the Holocaust is the historical context: Germany was in a near-ruined state as a result of its defeat in World War I and the collapse of the German empire, and anti-Semitism had long been prevalent in much of Europe.

Some armed Jews did attempt an uprising against the Nazis in Warsaw, Poland, in 1943, although their rebellion was largely crushed, Dr. Steinweis wrote.

Claims gun control facilitated the Holocaust “not only trivialize the predicament in which Jews found themselves in Germany and elsewhere in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. They also trivialize the serious, prolonged and admirable efforts undertaken by many Germans to work through the causes of their country’s catastrophic mistakes of that period,” he wrote.

Despite that, several people made similar claims to Sen. Lawson one week before during a committee hearing for a gun control bill, and some Delawareans voiced their support for his Tuesday defense of gun rights.

Sen. Lawson is no stranger to speaking his mind and has stirred up controversy for comments before: In 2017, he walked out of the Senate chamber during a reading of a Muslim prayer by an imam.

“We heard from the Quran that advocates for our very demise and that’s brought into this chamber as a prayer to open this session. I take great exception to that,” he said. “I fought for this country not to be damned by someone that comes in here and prays to their god for our demise. I think that’s despicable.”

That also prompted widespread criticism, and hundreds attended a rally in support of Delaware’s Muslim community a few weeks later.

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Some armed Jews did attempt an uprising against the Nazis in Warsaw, Poland, in 1943, although their rebellion was largely crushed, Dr. Steinweis wrote.

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