Ben Carson&#x27;s comments weren&#x27;t in a void: it&#x27;s long been an NRA hobbyhorse that the holocaust wouldn&#x27;t have happened if only the Jews had guns.  He&#x27;s just repeating a long-stated claim.<p>The problem is that for those events in WWII where such a claim can be tested -- for example, the Ghetto Uprising -- the claim fails miserably.  In the Ghetto Uprising, the Nazis lost 300 soldiers and the Jews lost at least 13,000 people, perhaps far more.<p>I think what we&#x27;re seeing in this article is an attempt to redefine the metric:<p>&gt; Nearly every Jew who participated was eventually killed — but they were going to be killed anyway. By choosing to stand and fight, the Warsaw Jews diverted a significant amount of Nazis resources from battlefields elsewhere, thus hastening the Nazi defeat.<p>So according to the author, Jewish deaths don&#x27;t really count as a metric because they were &quot;going to be killed anyway&quot;. And the metric instead should be about whether &quot;significantly resources were diverted&quot;, a highly dubious claim in and of itself.  Essentially the uprising would be considered &quot;successful&quot; if it hastened the end of the war, not if the people in the Ghetto were saved.<p>Whether true or not, the problem with this claim is that it doesn&#x27;t help the gun lobby&#x27;s agenda, which is used to justify arming people in the US: that having guns would have prevented the immediate deaths of those with the guns.  The whole article reeks of misdirection.