In 2015, following a resurgence of claims linking the Holocaust to current debates about gun regulation after a mass shooting at an Oregon community college, ADL National Director Jonathan Green­blatt wrote that “ADL has responded to this talking point countless times since it first surfaced in 2013, when there were a slew of Holocaust and Nazi analogies as part of the gun debate.” Greenblatt then made several points debunking the claim, including that it is “mind-bending to suggest that personal firearms in the hands of the small number of Germany's Jews (about 214,000 remaining in Germany in 1938) could have stopped the totalitarian onslaught of Nazi Germany when the armies of Poland, France, Belgium and numerous other countries were overwhelmed by the Third Reich.”

PolitiFact has similarly rated the claim that firearm regulation in Nazi Germany enabled the Holocaust as false, explaining that “strict German gun regulation was in place before Hitler rose to power and he later oversaw gun laws that loosened many firearm restrictions” and that denying “guns specifically to Jews” was a “trivial factor” in the Holocaust. As Alex Seitz-Wald explained in 2013 at Salon, gun laws in Germany were unfairly applied to persecute Jews, but that is an indictment of Hitler’s anti-Semitism, not the laws themselves (emphasis original):