Rep. Don Young greets supporters at the Dena'ina Center on Tuesday, November 6, 2012, in Anchorage, Alaska. The Republican won his 21st term in Congresss. (Marc Lester/Anchorage Daily News/MCT via Getty Images)
In just the last decade of his lengthy tenure, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) has made quite a few bizarre and insensitive comments, saying the Deepwater Horizon oil spill was “not an environmental disaster,” using a racial slur to describe Latinos and suggesting wolves could solve homelessness, among other controversies.
Last week, Young, who is currently the longest-serving member of the House, weighed in on the national debate on firearms by suggesting the Holocaust could have been avoided if Jewish people had armed themselves.
“How many millions of people were shot and killed because they were unarmed? Fifty million in Russia, because their citizens weren’t armed,” Young said during a conference in Juneau, Alaska Public Media reported.
“How many Jews were put in the ovens because they were unarmed?” he added.
The Anti-Defamation League rejected the idea that guns could have prevented the mass murder of up to 6 million Jewish people and millions of others during World War II.
“It’s offensive for anyone to manipulate the history of the Holocaust to score political points,” the Jewish civil rights organization tweeted in response to Young’s comments, noting that the real causes of the genocide were anti-Semitism and hate.