CALLER: I’m very concerned, it seems like there’s so many people who have not read and do not understand how quickly Germany was turned into, it was a democracy, then turned into a dictatorship by everyone having to register their guns and then they went door to door and collected them. HUCKABEE: People do forget that. And by the way, [caller] know, that when you bring that up you get people who get crazy on us, and they’ll start saying, “Oh there you go comparing to the Nazis.” And I understand the reaction, but it’s the truth. You cannot take people’s rights away if they’re resisting and if they have the means to resist, but once they’re disarmed and the people who are trying to take over have all the power, not just political, not just financial, but they have the physical power to domesticate us and to subjugate us to our will there’s not a whole lot we can do about it other than just plan to die in the course of resistance. […] In every society and culture where dictators take over, one of the things they have to do is get control of the military and the police and ultimately all of the citizens and make sure the citizens are disarmed and can’t fight in the streets. Gosh I hope it doesn’t come to that.

Radio host and perennial "prominent Republican" Mike Huckabee is rapidly becoming what Rush Limbaugh used to be 20 years ago. (What Rush is now we'll leave as the topic for another time.) Here Huckabee is embracing the far-right militia logic of violence and conspiracy theories with open arms, and then some Getting the first thing out of the way, no, it's not true; the Nazi regime weakened gun regulations, it didn't strengthen them. That's a lost cause, however, as it's one of the conservative "facts" that will stick around until long after the fall of civilization itself, and even after that, as future alien archeologists will be finding primitive cave paintings of Hitler taking people's guns away and displaying them in their alien museums as the one of the few remaining artifacts of western culture. So we're just going to ignore that part.

What's more interesting to me is that Mike Huckabee, the once supposedly reasonable Republican, continues to peddle crackpot, militia-level conspiracy theories to his audience with no apparent shame—but gosh, I hope it doesn't come to that, he says. The core notion is that we need lots and lots of guns in case patriots need to start murdering the government, so it goes without saying that fighting off even the most basic of gun safety efforts is a noble, patriotic clause. The current rate of mass murders and other random killings aren't the symptom of a problem, in this mindset, they're just the necessary validation that the citizenry does indeed have enough access to high-powered weaponry to murder a very large number of people quickly if any single one of them feels like it. Forget talk of well-regulated; any talk of regulating the ability of any one random person to commit such acts is tantamount to nascent dictatorship.

These people, the ostentatiously Christian Mike Huckabee included, look to the prospect of potential mass murder against the government as a perfectly valid political position to have. They look to such acts as potential patriotism; others would call the same thing terrorism, but all terrorists consider themselves patriots for one cause or another. The rather unusual thing about this particular crowd is how circular the logic is. They need to be able to murder the government if the government appears to be taking actions that limit their ability to murder that government, and that's usually the extent of the argument. Not as a group, mind you, but as individual citizens, each making the decision as to what would require government assassinations on their own, based on their own internal logic, armed with enough firepower by themselves to inflict enough necessary "damage" to make their point.

That's now the advocated-for position among everything from conservative radio hosts to the National Rifle Association to any number of obviously unhinged, heavily armed YouTube video hosts. How is that not nuts?

