Comment by Throwawayxtu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Throwawayxtu | Hacker News Reader

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Ben Carson's comments weren't in a void: it's long been an NRA hobbyhorse that the holocaust wouldn't have happened if only the Jews had guns. He's just repeating a long-stated claim.

The problem is that for those events in WWII where such a claim can be tested -- for example, the Ghetto Uprising -- the claim fails miserably. In the Ghetto Uprising, the Nazis lost 300 soldiers and the Jews lost at least 13,000 people, perhaps far more.

I think what we're seeing in this article is an attempt to redefine the metric:

> Nearly every Jew who participated was eventually killed — but they were going to be killed anyway. By choosing to stand and fight, the Warsaw Jews diverted a significant amount of Nazis resources from battlefields elsewhere, thus hastening the Nazi defeat.

So according to the author, Jewish deaths don't really count as a metric because they were "going to be killed anyway". And the metric instead should be about whether "significantly resources were diverted", a highly dubious claim in and of itself. Essentially the uprising would be considered "successful" if it hastened the end of the war, not if the people in the Ghetto were saved.

Whether true or not, the problem with this claim is that it doesn't help the gun lobby's agenda, which is used to justify arming people in the US: that having guns would have prevented the immediate deaths of those with the guns. The whole article reeks of misdirection.

According to the author it's better to die on your feet and take out some Nazis than die as a slave helping the Nazis. Also, according to the author, the Nazis might have thought twice about Poland if there were uprisings in more than just Warsaw.

Sometimes these uprisings do actually save the people involved. It wouldn't have saved the Jews, but it did save about half of the Tutsis.

Closer to home, it's also worth reading the book "We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement". tl;dr; violent terrorists were regularly attacking black Americans, American Indians and insufficiently loyal white people, and armed resistance put a big dent in it. (Note that law enforcement generally sided with the terrorists.)

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hayes_Pond

Wrong.

The whole point is that even without ready access to guns, the Jews were able to fight of a powerful army. The idea here is to extrapolate how things would have went had they been armed to start with:

" There was little “gun culture” among European Jews of the 1930s, so few Jews had the equipment for “reloading” — the home manufacture of ammunition"

"...home manufacture of ammunition is legal everywhere in the United States."

"The Germans suffered over a thousand casualties in the first week of fighting alone. The Germans had to spend more time subduing the Warsaw Ghetto than they did conquering the entire nations of Poland or France."

etc etc

But significant resources were diverted. Around 2,000 Nazi soldiers were tied down by around 1,000 Jewish resistance fighters armed with ancient revolvers and molotov cocktails. And they were tied down for longer than it took the German army to conquer all of Poland and France.

Holding up 2,000 soldiers for a month isn't a big deal in the scheme of millions of soldiers. But when it's done by only 1,000 incredibly poorly armed civilians, it shows what could have been done with more and better armed civilians.

Had the Germans been facing more and better armed civilians, they would have used different and more effective tactics.

Instead, the Germans decided to deport the Jews. Had they just gone from the start shelled/bombed the ghetto, and set it on fire, they would have lost many fewer soldiers and taken less time.

Also, the Wikipedia page says the backbone of the German troops were '821 Waffen-SS paramilitary soldiers from five SS Panzergrenadier reserve and training battalions and one SS cavalry reserve and training battalion'. These are not the prime troops that would be on the front lines.

That's not to say there was no effect, but I don't think it's reasonable to say "significant".

Also, a complete tally would need to subtract from the 2,000 count the number of German soldiers that were used to maintain the ghetto.

It does seem rather dubious to talk about "resources diverted" as a sufficient metric for success in this context, but I think that this story is also not a particularly strong rebuttal to the NRA claim. From the article it appears that the rebels were initially armed with a very small number of poor quality low power weapons. We're not talking about the NRA utopia of widespread ownership of accurate semiautomatic rifles here.

Well, it's certainly true that if the Jews had tanks and nuclear weapons, things might have been different. But you have to understand that this NRA claim is in the context of a twin claim (also dubious in nature): that the Nazis had practiced gun control. So the general claim assumes that the Jews would have access to those weapons that they'd noramlly have had access to in the absence of the Nazi regime. Which is low power weapons.

there is only one fact used to justify that U.S. citizens can arm themselves, and that is the fact that our constitution guarantees us the right. no further emotional games are needed, but gun control enthusiasts want it to be a debate, so people play along.

Not subscribing to either side of the argument at the moment, but I just want to note: the Constitution is not the Word of God, it can and is changed whenever the society thinks something it turns out to be a spectacularly bad idea. When discussing whether that is the case, "it's in Constitution" is not a valid argument per se.

the Nazis lost 300 soldiers

So, you are saying that this statement "the Germans suffered over a thousand casualties in the first week of fighting alone" is false?

It seems he's pulling that number out of thin air: perhaps he's conflating it with the general Warsaw uprising. The German figures are about 20 killed, and about 100 injured. Marek Edelman (a leader of the uprising) had an optimistic estimate of about 300 casualties. So the likely figure is likely somewhere between.

"casualties" includes injuries

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