Fox News host Mike Huckabee warned on his radio show that the government could be planning to confiscate firearms in order to launch a dictatorship after a caller compared conditions in the United States today to those in Nazi Germany.

On the April 3 edition of The Mike Huckabee Show, Huckabee defended a caller's claim about firearm confiscation in Nazi Germany as “the truth.” He added, “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.”

According to Huckabee, if the government were to confiscate privately owned firearms, “there's not a whole lot we can do about it other than just plan to die in the course of resistance” :

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. It's very true [caller], and I appreciate you bringing it up. I know that people are probably calling and saying you know you shouldn't have brought that up. 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.

The Senate legislative package to reduce gun violence does not involve the confiscation of firearms, instead it calls for expanding background checks, adding missing records to the current background check system, cracking down on gun trafficking, and improving school security.

Huckabee's acceptance of the caller's view of what happened in Nazi Germany as “the truth” is also ahistorical. As Salon's Alex Seitz-Wald noted in a January 11 article, “the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone's guns is mostly bogus.” In fact, Hitler loosened gun laws for his political allies while banning firearms for the people he wished to oppress, which is an indictment of fascistic policies -- not gun violence prevention laws.