Gun Control Helped Usher in Nazi Germany?

Did gun control usher in Nazi Germany? And if so, could that apply to us? But also, would more gun rights even give citizens a fighting chance against a tyrannical US military? Those are just two of the many questions we will be diving into in this video. We will also look at the debate around how the Second Amendment should apply to civilians, whether the government is morally guilty of murder if it restricts gun rights, and much more.

And before we go further, you might be wondering at this point, is this video a gun rights advocacy video? Is it a gun control video? Neither. My intent is not to choose a side and push my opinion. I of course have an opinion, but I try to work from a position of curiosity. I really wanted to learn about these specific topics and I had these questions and I figured I would take you guys along on the ride. We're going to dive into some of the top debates around gun rights and see where the cards fall. So, you'll see both sides.

Okay, with that being said and without further ado, let's get started and talk about gun rights in America. First up, we're going to talk about the Second Amendment. Gun rights advocates point to the constitution which states in the second amendment a well-reggulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The idea here is that an armed populace can resist tyranny if the government fears its own citizens because those citizens have guns or other weapons. A lot of people may downplay this concern, but history supports this fear. And I'll discuss an example, Nazi Germany to be specific in a bit because the way that happened is very interesting and actually shows why the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.

But let's flip it real quick and discuss the gun control side of this issue. Those for gun control point out that the Constitution was written in the 18th century where the most advanced weapon was a musket. They argue that maybe the founding fathers didn't mean for us to have AR-15s. Plus, maybe they couldn't conceptualize how advanced weaponry could actually get. I mean, can an AR-15 really stand against an F-35 fighter jet? Essentially, they're pointing out that the founding fathers weren't able to predict how dangerous civilian-owned weapons could get. And even with how dangerous they are, they were also unable to predict how advanced military-grade weapons would get. As a result, civilians have dangerous weapons they use on each other. And those very weapons that are supposed to protect us from the government and from government tyranny would never be able to actually stand up against the army anyway. So what's the point?

But we can rebut these arguments kind of. Like usual, it's complicated and nuanced. First, I want to focus on the fact that a musket in the 18th century was the most advanced weaponry at the time. Just because the founding fathers didn't write about AR-15s in the Constitution does not mean they weren't able to predict that weapons would continue to advance. It would be kind of silly to think that they were too stupid to predict advancements in technology. If anything, I could argue that since the founding fathers didn't restrict the kind of weapon accessible to civilians in the Second Amendment, thus allowing them access to the most dangerous weapon at the time, which was the musket, they made a conscious decision to give civilians a right to own the most dangerous weapon of that time period and any future time period. In the 18th century, the army used muskets, and the founding fathers wanted the people to have access to that same exact weapon, a military-grade weapon. Gun control advocates may try to argue that the musket limits the American population, but one could argue that it actually illustrates how broad the Second Amendment can go and how serious the founding fathers actually were.

Okay. Second, armed populations can actually fight off advanced armies to a degree. Let's talk about whether an armed militia can actually fight off a trained government-backed army. So the easiest and most obvious example would be the American Revolution starting in 1775 where we had armed colonists resisting what they saw as British tyranny. Civilian militias were created made up of farmers and tradesmen and they predated the Continental Army. Then once the Continental Army was created, these militias played a huge role alongside it. The thing is though, the militias also relied on French arms, money, and military support. So they had foreign aid. Similarly, we had the Afghan Mujahedin fighters from 1979 to 1989 resisting Soviet occupation. Although they were vastly outnumbered and outgunned, they used guerrilla warfare and forced the Soviets to withdraw. But once again, there was foreign aid. The US and Pakistan supported the guerrillas, which obviously really helped. So, can we definitively say that having an armed populace or an armed militia will beat a tyrannical government? No, not definitively. Does it increase our chance of beating a tyrannical government? I'd say yes. And since our world is very interconnected, I would assume that foreign governments would get involved in some capacity. So that would help as well. We can't really look at this in a vacuum.

Okay, let's move on to a similar aspect of this debate because we just looked at the argument of whether armed populations can create militias that could fight a tyrannical government. But also we have to look at whether an armed population could stop tyranny before it even occurs. The road to tyranny has many many steps. But I'm going to simplify it drastically to discuss this particular point. And I ask that you forgive me for this. Okay. We have the time before tyranny occurs and then the time after tyranny occurs. That's what we're going to look at. The time before the leadup. See, not only do we have the idea that an armed populace could fight an army that's implementing tyranny, but we also have the idea that an armed populace could stop tyranny from ever occurring in the first place. It's much harder for a government to become authoritarian when the people are armed to the teeth than when they're not, which means having an armed populace may stop a government from even thinking about tyranny. At the very least, it would make recruiting people who support the tyrannical government a bit harder, right? I mean, you'd hope. And this is where gun advocates point out how gun control could hurt us. Because with guns, maybe we don't even have to worry about whether a militia would fight off the government or not. Because the government isn't going to try take that risk. It's just too great of a risk. The fallout is not worth it.

And now is when we're going to discuss Nazi Germany because I believe this is a very interesting example of what gun rights advocates really fear might happen if we do implement gun regulations. The Nazis were not the first political party to implement gun control in Germany. It was actually introduced under the Weimar Republic in the 1920s when Germany was a constitutional republic. In response to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the German government passed the regulations on weapon ownership which declared that all firearms and ammunition be surrendered immediately. Anyone who was found with a firearm or ammunition was subject to severe prison time and fines, which was a huge punishment, especially given the fact that Germany was at this time experiencing hyperinflation and large-scale poverty. Then on August 7th, 1920, the government enacted a second gun regulation law called the law on the disarmament of the people, which further restricted gun ownership. This was less about preventing just ordinary crime and more about preventing armed uprising in the unstable post-war years. But in 1928, the law on firearms and ammunition was enacted, which then relaxed gun restrictions kind of. The thing is, it it didn't actually. It relaxed gun ownership, but maintained restrictions as to their use and instruction of their use. It also put into effect a very strict firearm licensing scheme. Essentially, it was still very, very hard to get or use a gun. In 1931, Weimar authorities discovered plans for a Nazi takeover where Jews would be denied food and persons refusing to surrender their guns within 24 hours would be executed. In response to these threats, the government authorized the registration of all firearms and the confiscation of them in the name of public safety. We've heard that many times, haven't we? Anyway, in 1933, the Nazis seized power and used these very records to identify, disarm, and attack political opponents and Jews. The police revoked gun licenses of social democrats and anyone else they deemed were not politically reliable. In 1938, the Nazis then reformed weapons laws and loosened the restrictions for Nazi party loyalists, but sharpened restrictions on Jews who via a directive from Gestapo Council Werner Best were completely banned from possessing weapons. Later decrees made Jewish gun possession punishable by prison and confiscation. Leading up to the night of the broken glass, the Gestapo continued to seize weapons from German Jews. Some believe that the fact that the Gestapo did this is evidence that the night of the broken glass was planned in advance. The Gestapo wanted to disarm the Jews to minimize any risk of resistance. The night of broken glass occurred from November 9th to the 10th in 1938 and was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi party's SA and SS paramilitary forces along with some help from the Hitler Youth and German civilians. This operation was allegedly conducted as a search for weapons. German authorities looked on while people ransacked Jewish homes, hospitals, and synagogues. The results were truly devastating. Over 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms were destroyed. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. We are well aware of Nazi Germany, but I'm not sure how aware we are of how Nazi Germany came into power and more specifically how gun regulations and gun control played a crucial role in that. As a result, it's a historical fact that many gun rights advocates point to in support of their argument that gun control laws and specifically national registries could be used by later governments against us, the people.

And this kind of leads into what I want to talk about next, which is gun regulation in the US. I just gave you guys a huge argument against gun regulation. But there's more to the conversation because despite that historical example, people still argue we need gun laws in the US. And that's totally understandable because we had 16,576 firearm deaths in 2024. That's excluding deaths by suicide, and we had 31,490 firearm injuries in 2024. Now in 2023 there were 46,728 gun-related deaths. And this number does include suicides, just to give you the whole picture here. That means if we include in our total the number of deaths increase significantly. How you want to calculate gun deaths is really up to you though. Some argue that suicides should not be included in the count because that's a mental health issue. Others argue that suicides should be included in the count because those individuals may not have successfully killed themselves if they didn't have access to a firearm. But either way, we have a high number of gun deaths every year. That's a fact. We also have a very American-specific criminal experience, which is mass shootings. In 2023, we had 14 mass shootings. In 2024, we had three. And so far in 2025, we have had five. I'm not sure how updated this is, so if it's higher than that for 2025, I apologize. I got these statistics from Britannica.

Okay. Now, before anyone starts correcting me here, Britannica used a US statute called the Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act of 2012 to define what a mass killing is, which is three or more killings in a single incident. They also included one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area. Now, when I look at commonwealthfund.org or other sources, I see that they say, well, commonwealthfund.org says that there were 248 US mass shootings within 6 months in 2024. And I was like, when I saw this, I was like, what the actual, because that's a huge difference. Okay, here's the thing. Commonwealth Fund defined mass shootings as incidents where four or more people were killed or shot. And I think that's the big difference here. And I think we can see that reflected in this stat that although there were 43,000 gun deaths linked to firearms in 2024, mass shootings actually accounted for fewer than 2% of all gun deaths in the US. So in essence, we also have a lot of people being shot but not necessarily being killed in instances of mass shootings. These would fall into the firearm injury category, but not deaths. To look at this through another lens, the US has 10.6 gun deaths per 100,000 people according to 2016 statistics. That's far higher when compared to countries like Canada, which is 2.1 per 100,000, and Australia, which is one per 100,000. But I do want to point out the majority of gun deaths are suicides. In 2023, 58% of gun deaths were by suicide. So we should take that into consideration along with the fact that in these other countries, suicides are likely occurring by other means. To better frame this, gun deaths minus suicides per 100,000 people in 2023 was 5.6. Regardless of all of this, I'm just trying to give you as much information as possible. My point here is we have a lot of people getting shot or dying from guns. So wanting some form of gun control is very understandable. But then we have to ask, does gun control work? Also, is it worth it given the risk I previously discussed? Let's look at whether it works or not.

Okay, gun control advocates often look at other countries as proof that it does in fact work. And I gave you the stats a second ago. The rate of death by gun in other countries is significantly lower than in the US. To round out those stats, I'll let you know that France has 2.7 gun deaths for every 100,000 people. Germany has 0.9 gun deaths per 100,000 people, and Spain has 0.6 gun deaths per 100,000 people. Even when we remove suicides from this picture, we still see a huge difference between the US and other developed countries. So, like I said, gun control advocates point to these other countries in support of gun laws. But there are some flaws to this thinking. First, the United States shares a very long uninterrupted border with Mexico, which is a developing nation that shares a border with Central America, which has a lot of undeveloped nations. And this region, plus, if you want to add South America in there, has a lot of violence. Check out this homicide map where we see a very stark difference between the Americas and Europe. As a geography major, I can't help but think America is set up to have more violence regardless of gun laws because of its border and the channel from South America to Mexico. So, if we enact national gun laws, we are going to have to have very strict border laws. Otherwise, black market guns will just take the place of legally owned guns.

Second, I could not find much reliable research that found gun regulations actually worked. Hear me out because a lot of politicians say that they do work, but I looked at the research, okay? The Rand Corporation wrote a research report called a critical synthesis of research evidence on the effects of gun policies in the United States, second edition. It looked at what the scientific literature reveals on various gun laws. The 2020 RAND report concludes that gun policies have modest effects and support a few different conclusions that gun regulations help in some cases. For example, evidence supports that child access prevention laws or safe storage laws reduce self-inflicted fatal or non-fatal firearm injuries. But Reason comes in to point out that in the 2020 RAND report of the 27,900 research publications on the effectiveness of gun regulation, only 123 studies met Rand's criteria as being a rigorous empirical study. That's 0.4%. Meaning most of the studies were not trustworthy as actual dependable studies that we can cite to support our beliefs. Rand then looked at the 123 studies and came to its own conclusions. That being said, Reasonz then had a risk analyst and statistician look at the Rand report and this is what he found. Okay, first, the 123 studies still had serious statistical defects and were not reliable for any conclusion either way. Second, the most widely referenced results have no support in being anything more than a false positive, meaning they can't find actual causation between gun regulation and positive or negative impact. And what they did find actually falls below even random chance, which actually implies that there may be some manipulation of data. Third, we really struggle with studying gun regulation for a variety of reasons. A. Gun violence, although seemingly common to us, is not actually common enough to study. B. Regulations take years to implement and take effect. C. Many of these regulations only affect guns for sale, not guns already in circulation. And there are a lot in circulation. Right now, there are about a little under 400,000. D. Gun homicide rates in any given state fluctuate by an average of 6% every year, even without regulations. The fact of the matter is, it seems studies on gun regulation have too many variables to lead to true conclusions, which when you look at the complexity of life makes a lot of sense. That being said, if you have an opinion on what kind of gun regulation you think may be helpful and you have an argument as to why, I would love to hear it in the comments. I want, like all Americans, to decrease gun deaths, and I'm open to conversations.

Okay, up next we're going to look at the idea that gun control regulations do not impact criminal use of guns, which is a common gun advocacy argument. Here's the argument. Criminals don't follow laws, so gun control would most likely hurt individual law-abiding citizens rather than stop criminals from possessing and using guns. Now, someone may respond to this, okay, well, all criminals are going to violate all laws, so why have any laws? I guess we should just follow anarchy, huh? Well, the situation of gun regulation is a bit different than laws in general. See, gun laws are only aimed at criminals, not at the average citizen. And most laws are not like this. They're applied to all people across the board. For example, we don't want anyone speeding. No one. Whether you are a criminal or just an average citizen. But in cases of gun ownership, we are okay with the good guys having guns. We just don't want the bad guys to have guns. We are specifically looking to restrict killers, armed robbers, rapists, etc. But gun law violations are misdemeanors and the people we want to restrict are willing to commit felonies. So, it's only logical we would assume that someone willing to commit a felony would also commit a misdemeanor if it helped them accomplish that felony. Right?

Okay. But a rebuttal to this, it could be that making guns harder to get may be the necessary barrier between someone committing a felony and someone not. Maybe we just need some more roadblocks, right? And it's possible that could work. That seems common sensical. But then, would the degree to which it worked, if it worked, be worth the potential downside? Because another aspect of this entire debate includes self-defense? Many gun advocates argue that gun regulations will decrease the ability of private citizens defending themselves against criminals. A professor named Dr. Michael Huer gave some interesting hypotheticals of this that I'm going to walk you guys through.

Okay. Hypo one. A killer enters the victim's house. An accomplice holds the victim down while the killer stabs the victim to death. The question is, what's the moral status of the accomplice's actions? Your gut response likely is that this is a serious wrong. Maybe not as wrong as killing the victim outright, but it's comparable. It's close.

Okay. Hypo 2. A killer enters the victim's house. The victim intends to defend herself with a gun. The accomplice grabs the victim's gun and runs away with the intent of barring her from defending herself. Or maybe not even with the intent. Does that change anything? Let's keep going. Then the killer stabs the victim to death. The question is, what is the moral status of the accomplice's action? Again, gut response is that the accomplice robbed the victim of self-defense. That that is comparable to holding her down, and therefore it's comparable to actually killing her.

Finally, hypo 3. A citizen wants to own a gun for self-defense. The state prevents her from having a gun because of some kind of regulation or takes her gun away. The citizen is then victimized by a criminal. Let's say she's killed. The question is, what is the moral status of the state's action? I'm sure you see the parallel here. Is the state culpable in the victim's death? Is the state similar to the accomplice? The argument here is that the state is an accomplice to rape, murder, burglary, assault, really any crime where a gun could have been used as self-defense, but was not because state regulations barred the victim from possessing the gun. He argues that this is morally on par with committing a crime, like the accomplice.

Now, I think that's a bit simplified because there is a lot more going on in situations where the state applies gun regulations versus when an accomplice just steals a gun from someone who's in a state of peril. We see a direct action from the accomplice in real time. Gun regulations are not as direct, nor are they barring the victim in real time while she is in peril. This also doesn't consider the fact that in a democracy, people might vote to have gun regulations. So, how do we share that culpability then? Are the people also culpable because they wanted gun regulations? And also, we have to take into consideration the intent. The accomplice may have intentionally taken the gun away because he or she wanted the victim to die, but is there intent with the government? Does the intent matter? These are all things we need to consider. I could keep going. I'm not going to go further into the details, but if you have something to say in the comments, I'd love to hear it.

Anyways, so you might be thinking, okay, self-defense. How often does that actually save someone, though? I want to compare it to gun death. Makes sense. Well, the answer is complicated, but are we surprised at this point? So, estimates range from 55,000 times a year to 4.7 million times a year someone uses a gun in self-defense. And I want to say this, it doesn't mean they shoot someone. It means that they could have brandished the weapon or something like that. It just means that the gun was used in self-defense in some capacity. The most cited estimate is by Gary Kleck and his study found that guns are used for self-defense around 2.5 million times a year. And I want to point out here, this is something honestly kind of interesting. That super low 55,000 number is a survey done by the DOJ and it's not anonymous, meaning we would expect a downward bias. Many people may not want to talk to the chief law enforcement agency of the government about something they fear could be illegal when they are not anonymous. So that's important to to remember when it comes to statistics.

So after this, you may be asking, what about banning assault weapons? Okay, so maybe we don't ban handguns. They are needed for self-defense, but what about all these other weapons? Are they actually needed? Can we let the handguns be but remove the AR-15s? So we can look at this graph by Britannica of the number of mass shootings per year. There was an assault weapons ban from 1994 to 2004. And we see a pretty striking decrease in mass shootings except for 1999. I don't know what was going on that year, but that's an anomaly. Here's the thing. In this graph, there are a total of 291 mass shootings. Of those, 57% of them were done with a handgun. On top of that, the 32% that were done with semi-automatic rifles, well, they actually might not be included in an assault weapons ban because they actually aren't considered assault rifles. An assault rifle is a selective fire rifle and can fire in automatic, so a continuous firing as long as the trigger is held. That being said, the assault weapons ban of 1994 did include the manufacture for civilian use certain semi-automatic firearms that were defined as assault weapons. So there may be some effect here, especially in regards to mass shootings since we can see they decreased within that time period. I think it's worth checking this out a little bit more and I will probably do more research on this. But I also want to remind all of us that of all gun deaths, less than 2% were the result of mass shootings. So even if we did ban semi-automatic rifles, the decrease in deaths would be minimal. So does that mean we shouldn't do it? I don't know. Compare that result with potential tyranny or maybe the need for semi-automatic rifles on farms and ranches to protect livestock from wolves and bears.

As we have continued to realize throughout the entire video, this is complex. It's a complex situation and there are many moving variables. And that's why I think it's really important in this entire conversation to understand the complexity of humans and human society because politicians, agencies, organizations, corporations, all of them really, they try to paint the world in broad strokes using only the colors black and white. They benefit from our divide and are infighting because they need support and money. Nuance does not benefit them. Complexity means nothing to them. The only way to actually solve a lot of the issues plaguing our society is to understand that solutions are going to have to be holistic. To realize that everything is interrelated, which means a policy over here might have an effect on a problem over here. But the only way to do this is to keep having these conversations in civil and respectful ways and to lead with curiosity rather than a point to prove.

I started my research and I'm just going to be honest here because I want you guys to know where I'm coming from. I started my research on gun rights and gun control with an opinion and I actually wanted to find an argument that supported gun regulations. I've been really struggling with the number of gun deaths we are experiencing and the mass shootings. I turn on the TV every damn day and hear about more death. I just want a solution. It's not that I wanted gun regulation because I don't care about tyranny. I do. But I'm desperate for a solution. And I think a lot of Americans are desperate for solutions as well. But the thing is is I walked away from my research without a solution because I can't really find a simple answer to a very wide-reaching problem. I mean, I'm definitely more educated now, so that's cool. And my research definitely is not stopping anytime soon. So, I will keep working on this and learning, but I will say I'm a bit at a loss. So, I don't know after watching this and your own knowledge, your background, if you have any potential solutions, please let me know. I'd love to hear about them and maybe your comment will lead to my next rabbit hole deep dive and resulting video which you can watch. But until the next time I come out with a video which will be next Sunday, I want you guys to stay safe and stay curious.