Gun Control Laws Are So The Holocaust, Michigan GOP Chair Insists

She also believes in sexually transmitted demons, so what did we expect?

Last week, partly in response to the deadly mass shooting at Michigan State University in East Lansing, the Michigan state Senate passed some of the most gentle (still important!) gun safety measures on earth — the kind of gun safety measures that are so reasonable that even the vast majority of gun-owners think they are good ideas, like expanded background checks and red flag laws and safe storage laws.

On Wednesday of this week, the Michigan Republican Party's social media manager woke up and decided to compare those entirely reasonable laws to ... the Holocaust.

 The tweet read "#History has shown us that the first thing a government does when it wants total control over its people is to disarm them. President Reagan once stated, 'if we lose #freedom here, there is nowhere else to escape to. This is the last stand on Earth,'" above a picture of wedding rings collected at concentration camps reading, in the traditional Impact font, "Before they collected all these wedding rings, they collected all the guns."

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— (@)  

It did not go over well. Shockingly enough, a lot of people, including many Republicans, found it to be in bad taste to compare background checks and red flag laws to the literal Holocaust.

While many Party chairs might, say, apologize for such a wildly inaccurate and hyperbolic statement, shiny new Michigan GOP chair Kristina Karamo stood by the tweet and defended it online, in text messages, and in a news conference.

Via the Washington Post:  

But the state party has doubled down on it instead, calling the criticism “bogus authoritarian frenzy over the legitimate comparison.” Kristina Karamo, a far-right election denier who was elected chair of the Michigan GOP last month, tweeted that the party stood by its statement and that the Second Amendment “was put in place to protect us from aspiring tyrants.”

“Speaking about the horrors of the Holocaust is no more offensive than speaking, about the horrors of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade that impacted my ancestors,” Karamo wrote in a text message to The Washington Post, when asked whether the party had privately offered an apology to any Jewish leaders or groups that had asked for one.

A defiant Karamo ignored the criticism at a news conference Wednesday afternoon, telling reporters, “I stand by that statement. I will not be intimidated or bullied for speaking the truth.” She added that she was “troubled that so many now want to make it taboo to look to history.”

Karamo, for the record, also believes in demons. Like, she thinks demons are real and that they can possess people, and if you have sex with someone who is possessed by one, than you open yourself up to possession by a demon — which is so ridiculous that it hasn't even been a plotline on any of the CW supernatural dramas that I definitely haven't seen every episode of.

Much like Sexually Transmitted Demons, the "Hitler took all of the guns and the Holocaust happened because people couldn't fight back," story is entirely fictional. It never happened. It is a fairy tale that conservatives tell themselves so they can sleep at night without thinking of all of the children who have died as a result of their opposition to gun control. (I kid — they wouldn't care either way.)

The Weimar Republic, not Hitler, instituted gun control after World War I — banning most private gun ownership at first and then later allowing for it as long as people were registered gun owners. Hitler didn't ban gun ownership for Jewish people until 1938 — five whole years after Hitler became Chancellor and established the Gestapo and four years after he declared himself Führer. He actually got rid of gun control laws almost entirely for gentiles at this time as well.

For the record, he didn't start universal health care either (another favorite Republican fairy tale) — Otto Von Bismarck did that in order to tamp down the increasing popularity of radical socialist and communist movements.

Even if it were true, which it's not, the idea that guns prevent "tyranny" in any capacity is absurd. Gun owners are not actually allowed to overthrow the government or assassinate the president, even if they really, really hate the government. Historically, attempting this has not worked out well for anyone, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the Civil War to John Wilkes Booth to Charles Guiteau to Squeaky Fromme to the January 6 insurrection. If it were meant to be legal to overthrow the government should you imagine that they are doing tyranny to you, then surely that would be in the Constitution as well.

That being said, if it were possible to overthrow the United States government with guns, it's not even remotely clear how that would be hindered by laws requiring parents to safely store guns so that their children can't get them, by red flag laws, or even with background checks.

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