"Gun control caused the Holocaust." That's an argument, rather unhelpfully phrased, that American gun-rights supporters have been making for decades.

There's no way to prove it. In fact, most of the time it's not even clear what alternate history is being suggested. Are we talking about a world in which the Nazis behaved exactly the way they did, but inexplicably allowed their victims to remain armed? A world in which, as the Nazis came to power, Germany already had a widespread and passionate gun culture like America's?

Unfortunately, this bold assertion obscures very serious questions about the role disarmament can play in oppression. And at last we have the historical information we need to investigate those questions, in the form of Second Amendment lawyer Stephen P. Halbrook's "Gun Control in the Third Reich." It is the most extensive history to date of Nazi Germany's policies on firearms, drawing largely on original documents.