One of the issues that liberals and gun control advocates are most loath to discuss is how heavily and effectively totalitarians and mass murderers have relied upon gun registration and other firearms controls to round up “enemies of the state.” Hitler, Stalin, Castro, and Mussolini all seized upon gun laws to punish, incarcerate, and even exterminate their opponents, while permitting their own evil cliques to expand and strengthen the state and party monopolies on gun ownership.
Stephen P. Halbrook, an attorney and Research Fellow with the Independent Institute in California, has written a remarkably well-documented analysis of how Adolf Hitler and his Nazi henchmen in the government made private, “unauthorized” gun ownership a capital crime, while using registration records to effectively turn ordinary Germans into instant criminals.
Halbrook’s book took 15 years to research and write, and he relied on German archivists and translators to assist him in plowing through original records and files from 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s Germany. The result is Gun Control in the Third Reich, a fascinating, readable, informative and important book.
