Throwawayxtu

Well, it's certainly true that if the Jews had tanks and nuclear weapons, things might have been different. But you have to understand that this NRA claim is in the context of a twin claim (also dubious in nature): that the Nazis had practiced gun control. So the general claim assumes that the Jews would have access to those weapons that they'd noramlly have had access to in the absence of the Nazi regime. Which is low power weapons.

It seems he's pulling that number out of thin air: perhaps he's conflating it with the general Warsaw uprising. The German figures are about 20 killed, and about 100 injured. Marek Edelman (a leader of the uprising) had an optimistic estimate of about 300 casualties. So the likely figure is likely somewhere between.

Ben Carson's comments weren't in a void: it's long been an NRA hobbyhorse that the holocaust wouldn't have happened if only the Jews had guns. He's just repeating a long-stated claim.

The problem is that for those events in WWII where such a claim can be tested -- for example, the Ghetto Uprising -- the claim fails miserably. In the Ghetto Uprising, the Nazis lost 300 soldiers and the Jews lost at least 13,000 people, perhaps far more.

I think what we're seeing in this article is an attempt to redefine the metric:

> Nearly every Jew who participated was eventually killed — but they were going to be killed anyway. By choosing to stand and fight, the Warsaw Jews diverted a significant amount of Nazis resources from battlefields elsewhere, thus hastening the Nazi defeat.

So according to the author, Jewish deaths don't really count as a metric because they were "going to be killed anyway". And the metric instead should be about whether "significantly resources were diverted", a highly dubious claim in and of itself. Essentially the uprising would be considered "successful" if it hastened the end of the war, not if the people in the Ghetto were saved.

Whether true or not, the problem with this claim is that it doesn't help the gun lobby's agenda, which is used to justify arming people in the US: that having guns would have prevented the immediate deaths of those with the guns. The whole article reeks of misdirection.