Red IS part of the rainbow, you know.

Fact-checkers have described this theory as “false” or “debunked.”[21][22][23][1]

In a 2011 magazine piece, law professor Mark Nuckols says Nazi gun control hypotheses are part of a “shaky intellectual edifice” underlying “belief in widespread gun ownership as a defense against tyrannical government.” He says the idea is “gaining traction with members of Congress as well as fringe conspiracy theorists.”[4] In his 2011 book, fellow law professor Adam Winkler says: “This radical wing of the gun rights movement focuses less on the value of guns for self-defense against criminals than on their value for fighting tyranny.”[15] He says the militia groups that grew in number across the U.S. after the early 1990s organized “to fight off what they saw as an increasingly tyrannical federal government and what they imagined was the inevitable invasion of the United States by the United Nations.”[24] Winkler wrote that “[to] some on the fringe,” the Brady Bill “was proof that the government was determined to deprive Americans of their constitutional rights.”[25]

Because mainstream scholars argue that gun laws in Germany were already strict prior to Hitler,[2][5][3][26] gun-control advocates may view the hypothesis as a form of Reductio ad Hitlerum.[7] In a 2004 issue of the Fordham Law Review, legal scholar Bernard Harcourt said Halbrook “perhaps rightly” could say that he made the first scholarly analysis of his Nazi-gun-registration subject, but as a gun-rights litigator, not as a historian.[5]:669–670 Harcourt called on historians for more research and serious scholarship on Nazi gun laws. “Apparently,” Harcourt wrote, “the historians have paid scant attention to the history of firearms regulation in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.”[5]:679–680 According to Harcourt, “Nazis were intent on killing Jewish persons and used the gun laws and regulations to further the genocide,”[5]:676 but the disarming and killing of Jews was unconnected with Nazi gun control policy, and it is “absurd to even try to characterize this as either pro- or anti-gun control.” If he had to choose, Harcourt said, the Nazi regime was pro-gun compared with the Weimar Republic that preceded it.[5]:671,677 He says that gun rights advocates disagree about the relationship between Nazi gun control and the Holocaust, with many distancing themselves from the idea. Political scientist Robert Spitzer said (in the same law review as Harcourt, who stated the same thing) the quality of Halbrook’s historical research is poor.[3] In reference to Halbrook’s hypothesis that gun control leads to authoritarian regimes, Spitzer says that “actual cases of nation-building and regime change, including but not limited to Germany, if anything support the opposite position.”[26]:728

Regarding the “Nazi gun control theory,” anthropologist Abigail Kohn wrote in her 2004 book:[2]

Such counterfactual arguments are problematic because they reinvent the past to imagine a possible future. In fact, Jews were not well-armed and were not able to adequately defend themselves against Nazi aggression. Thus, reimagining a past in which they were and did does not provide a legitimate basis for arguments about what might have followed.

In the encyclopedic 2012 book, Guns in American Society, Holocaust scholar Michael Bryant says Halbrook, LaPierre, Zelman, Dave Kopel, and others’ “use of history has selected factual inaccuracies, and their methodology can be questioned.”[3]

In January 2013, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) director Abraham Foxman said in a press release: “The idea that supporters of gun control are doing something akin to what Hitler’s Germany did to strip citizens of guns in the run-up to the Second World War is historically inaccurate and offensive, especially to Holocaust survivors and their families.”[27] Later that year, Jewish groups and Jersey City, New Jersey, mayor Steven Fulop criticized the NRA for comparing gun control supporters to Nazi Germany.[28] The Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ released a statement saying: “Access to guns and the systematic murder of six million Jews have no basis for comparison in the United States or in New Jersey. The Holocaust has no place in this discussion and it is offensive to link this tragedy to such a debate.”[28]

In October 2015, in response to comments made by Ben Carson, history professor Alan E. Steinweis wrote in a New York Times piece:

The Jews of Germany constituted less than 1 percent of the country’s population. It is preposterous to argue that the possession of firearms would have enabled them to mount resistance against a systematic program of persecution implemented by a modern bureaucracy, enforced by a well-armed police state, and either supported or tolerated by the majority of the German population. Mr. Carson’s suggestion that ordinary Germans, had they had guns, would have risked their lives in armed resistance against the regime simply does not comport with the regrettable historical reality of a regime that was quite popular at home. Inside Germany, only the army possessed the physical force necessary for defying or overthrowing the Nazis, but the generals had thrown in their lot with Hitler early on.[6]