Michigan legislators have promised and begun moving through a set of gun safety measures that would expand background checks, strengthen gun storage requirements, and possibly add new red flag laws. A month after three Michigan State University students were killed on campus in a shooter rampage that left at least five others critically wounded, Democratic representatives have so far been successful in moving the legislation forward in the face of the right-wing Second Amendment rage that we all now expect in the wake of each mass murder.
On Wednesday, whoever runs the official Michigan GOP Twitter account decided that the best way to defend against this attempt to make Michigan a safer place was to equate gun safety legislation with the Holocaust. Yeah, the Holocaust during World War II, as enacted by Nazis. The Holocaust. That Holocaust.
Because the country's right wing is both intellectually and rhetorically lazy, they decided to use a meme to make their already tasteless and historically inaccurate point. The image shows a black-and-white photo of hundreds—perhaps thousands—of rings, presumably collected from Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The writing on the meme reads, “Before they collected all these wedding rings … they collected all the guns.”
The Tweet was accompanied by these deep thoughts:
#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.” #2A #GOP
As you can imagine, this has gone down about as well as any other thing fascists have said about the Holocaust. In this case, however, even other Republicans are calling out the Michigan GOP for bad taste. Imagine that.
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For example, Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition, wrote, “This tweet by @MIGOP is absolutely inappropriate and offensive and should be taken down immediately.”
It is a longstanding mythology in some circles that the restrictive gun laws that the Nazis had (which included escalating restrictions on Jewish citizens) were the cause of the Holocaust. The part that those right-wing gun fetishists will always forget to mention is that, before the Nazis came into power, the gun laws in Germany were even more restrictive. The Nazis relaxed gun laws. The Nazis were like the first Second Amendment warriors abroad!
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But don’t you worry, guys: Michigan Republicans don’t care about your feelings, or about antisemitism. The entire Republican platform is predicated on the belief that a Jewish billionaire is worse than all of the other GOP billionaires combined! Here’s the Chairperson of the Michigan Republican Party Kristina Karamo’s statement on the tweet, explaining how far Jews can go eff themselves.
The United States of America, the nation I love and will fight to protect, in our history has enslaved Black Americans, disarmed and murdered Native Americans, threw Japanese Americans in interment camps, and forcibly sterilized American citizens who were mentally handicapped and from certain ethnic groups.
My ancestors were enslaved, and my great-great grandfather was lynched by a white mob in front of his entire family. Government abuse of citizens has not only happened in world history, but American history. We will not be silent as the Democratic Party, the party who fought to enslave Black Americans, and currently fights to murder unborn children, attempt to disarm us.
Our 2nd Amendment was put in place to protect us from aspiring tyrants. MIGOP stands by our statement.
Since then, the Michigan GOP account has retweeted Karamo—and attacked Michigan Democrats for trying to cancel them.
"Incrementally seeking to disarm citizens.” Huh. Do you mean, like, taking away their rights to their bodies? To an education? To vote?
The number of things that right-wing folks don’t know or get wrong entirely about the Holocaust could fill up a balloon the size of the moon. The arguments conservatives have against gun safety legislation are so devoid of logic and morality that it’s hard not to break one’s keyboard writing about them. If trends persist, we’ll have time to discuss this again, though, because if there’s one thing the Republican Party can’t seem to resist, it’s prioritizing the rights of white gun owners over the rights of literally everyone else.
Today, Kerry is joined by Drew Linzer, the director and co-founder of the well-regarded polling company, CIVIQs. Drew and Kerry talk about a recent CIVIQs poll that asked Americans from all walks of life about trans issues, among other things. Drew talks about the methodology and how the results show that conservatives tend to have more liberal views when questions are framed in terms of fundamental rights.
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