Questions and Answers: What is a good counter-argument to “the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if the Jews had guns”?

What is a good counter-argument to “the Holocaust wouldn’t have happened if the Jews had guns”?

The best counter-argument is this: Even if thousands of Jews had access to rifles, shotguns, and pistols of the era, they still would not have defeated professionally trained, professionally-led mechanized German forces.

It’s elementary. The Germans would have made mincemeat of a Jewish militia. They would have suffered losses, as they certainly did during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 1943. But the Germans had tanks, planes, armored vehicles, and heavy artillery. The Jews did not.

Also, consider: the victims of the Holocaust were not exclusively young men of military age in good health with access to firearms. They were civilians, and millions of them were elderly, children, and women. And it’s not like they had the ways and means to organize and arm themselves to form an organized resistance in several European nations occupied by the Germans and other Axis powers.

That’s why I find the argument that a militia armed with AR-15s and AK-47s would defeat a modern U.S.-style armed force to be rather fanciful at best.