Dr. Carson, Please Read Holocaust History

And, most recently, Carson on guns: "The likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed."

Challenged on his tendency toward Nazi metaphors, Carson's instinct is to double down. "Interestingly enough, in the last several weeks I've heard from many people in the Jewish community, including rabbis, who said, 'You're spot on,'" Carson told NBC's Chuck Todd last Sunday. "It is generally agreed that it is much more difficult to dominate people who are armed than people who are not armed. Some people will try to take that and make it into an anti-Jewish thing, which is foolishness."

The foolishness is entirely on Carson's part, and, unfortunately, on the part of Republican voters who seem inexplicably mesmerized by his soft-spoken outrageousness. In a recent Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register poll, 77 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers said they found Carson's statements about Hitler and guns attractive.

You don't have to be German, or a student of German history, to grasp the repugnance of Nazi analogies, but being at the scene of Hitler's crimes helps reinforce the caution against comparing the Holocaust to anything except another genocide. Nothing about which Carson complains -- alleged but unproven IRS targeting of Obama administration critics, what he sees as the chilling effect of political correctness -- comes close to the brutality of Hitler's Germany.

On guns, Carson's ahistorical notion that an armed populace, or armed Jews, could have stopped Hitler is nonsensical. As Columbia Law School professor Bernard Harcourt demonstrated in a 2004 Fordham Law Review article, gun laws in Germany between the two world wars reflect decreasing, not increasing, gun control.

"With regard to possession and carrying of firearms, the Nazi regime relaxed the gun laws that were in place in Germany at the time the Nazis seized power," Harcourt wrote. A populace that wanted to take up arms against Hitler would have had more opportunity to do so, not less. This one didn't.

Even as the Nazis relaxed gun ownership rules for others, Hitler in 1938 barred Jews from having guns and other weapons. But Jews accounted for less than 1 percent of the German population. Jews with guns were not going to overpower the SS men herding them onto the cars at Track 17.

This is a country that has accepted the unwelcome lessons of history. The same cannot be said for this man who would lead ours.

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Ruth Marcus' email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.