Ben Carson Defends Hitler Gun Control Statements, Calls ADL Reaction 'Total Foolishness'

— -- Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson defended his controversial remarks this morning in which he suggested that 6 million Jews would not have been slaughtered if they had easy access to guns.

“I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed,” Carson said on CNN Thursday. “I’m telling you there is a reason these dictatorial people take guns first."

The Anti-Defamation League condemned the comments, saying in a statement: “Ben Carson has a right to his views on gun control, but the notion that Hitler’s gun-control policy contributed to the Holocaust is historically inaccurate. The small number of personal firearms available to Germany’s Jews in 1938 could in no way have stopped the totalitarian power of the Nazi German state.”

Carson called the Anti-Defamation League’s statement this morning “total foolishness.”

“That's total foolishness,” Carson told George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America. “I’d be happy to discuss that in depth with anybody but it is well known that in many places where tyranny has taken over they first disarm the people. There’s a reason they disarm the people. They don’t just do it arbitrarily.”

In Carson's new book, “A Perfect Union,” Carson writes that “through a combination of removing guns and disseminating propaganda, the Nazis were able to carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance."

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