The Michigan Republican Party is facing bipartisan backlash on Wednesday over social media posts that tied recently passed gun reform bills to the Holocaust.
The state GOP posted a picture showing wedding rings that had been removed from Holocaust victims, embossed with the words, before they collected all the wedding rings, they collected all the guns. The state party wrote on Twitter that history has shown us that the first thing a government does when it wants to control its people is to disarm them. In its Facebook post, the party said that no good can come from a disarmed population, and argued against what it called unconstitutional red flag laws. Several Jewish lawmakers criticized the posts, with some calling for them to be taken down.
The Democratic candidate, Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., who announced a Senate bid, has urged the party to delete and apologize for the tweet, which she said ignorantly compared gun safety to the mass extermination of 6 million people. He said in a tweet that we must continue to make bipartisan progress on gun safety like we did last Congress - and not trivialize the Holocaust by making ignorant, insulting, and incorrect comparisons.
Matt Brooks, the chief executive of the Washington-based Republican Jewish Coalition, said the posts were absolutely inappropriate and offensive and should be removed immediately.
The Michigan Republican chair, Kristina Karamo, defended the posts in a statement.
She said that our 2nd Amendment was put in place to protect us from aspiring tyrants. MIGOP stands by our statement. The Michigan Republican Party did not respond to a request for additional comment Wednesday night.
The Michigan Senate recently approved a gun reform package passed along party lines, which included red flag laws, safe storage requirements and universal background checks.
Portions of the Senate-passed package are still making their way through the state legislature.
The most significant changes to gun statutes in the last three decades were made by President Joe Biden last year, with provisions for red flag laws and background checks that included juvenile records.