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Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop's grandparents survived Nazi imprisonment and made it to America.

(Terrence T McDonald/The Jersey Journal)



With one statement, Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop proved his knowledge of World War II history is slightly more nuanced — and vastly more correct — than the local chapter of the National Rifle Association.

It’s well-known that Fulop’s grandparents survived Nazi imprisonment and made it to America, where they eventually raised their family.

"Had my grandparents had guns, my grandparents would be dead and I would not be here today," Fulop said this week.

Fulop recounted his family’s Holocaust history in response to one of the NRA’s nuttier tropes: that Third Reich gun-control laws enabled the Holocaust, and that a well-armed Jewish militia could have turned back the Nazi hordes and stopped Hitler’s genocide. The NRA’s Nazi delusion was given new life this week by Scott Bach, an NRA board member from New Jersey, who tried to teach Fulop — after the mayor announced plans to quiz firearms manufacturers on gun control before renewing their city contracts — why he should be sympathetic to gunmakers.

It's a fairy tale that's historically inaccurate and offensive — made more so because Bach invoked Fulop's family. And it relies on one of the gun lobby's more bizarre fantasies: that card-carrying NRA members defend us from tyranny; that citizens armed with handguns and semi-automatics will repel the military's drones, tanks and bazookas.

Credit Fulop for his reasonable response, and Jewish groups for quickly denouncing Bach’s "disturbing" history lesson.

Sadly, it's no longer surprising. The NRA has little use for facts, since fear and fantasy have served its politics so well.

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