LETTER from HAL LEGG
Gun-Control Advocates
Equal Hitler – Really?
To the Editor:
This news organization recently published a letter in which Otsego County Rep. Rick Brockway, R-Laurens, presented his opinion – certainly worthy of your readers’ consideration – about the general availability of firearms. In contrasting his perspective with that held by Democrats running for president, Representative Brockway wrote: “Adolf Hitler said, ‘To conquer a nation, you first must disarm its people.’”
History rules out the acceptability of lightly characterizing others as der Führer. Casually invoking him as a rhetorical device designed to negate an opposing viewpoint trivializes the suffering of the millions whom Nazis imprisoned, enslaved and murdered.
It also diminishes the shared sacrifices that thousands of Americans and others of several nationalities and political beliefs, at home and abroad, in an out of uniform, selflessly made to end the Third Reich, liberate a continent and, in doing so, become the Greatest Generation.
Hitler brutally perpetrated the most vile atrocity of the last century. Contemporary Democrat presidential candidates, on the other hand,
suggest that the abundance of guns in our country is having ill effects. These two are not equivalent.
Attempting to draw similarities between them is grotesque.
HAL LEGG
Oneonta
It’s very sad that you don’t see the irony in your own letter. The sad fact remains that we are hearing almost word for word repetitions of the same rhetoric used by the Third Reich to convince every-day people in Germany that they just wanted to make a better Germany for all.
Absolute denial of wrong intentions and wrong doing is what they were counting on. Absolute denial of wrong intentions and wrong doing is what is being counted on now.
No, sir, pointing out the history of how bad people come into power certainly does not diminish the shared sacrifices that thousands of Americans selflessly made to end the Third Reich. But certainly your insistence that this is not what it looks like does.