NRA Board Member Cites The Holocaust As Reason To Not Fill Out Gun Safety Survey

National Rifle Association board member Scott Bach wondered on NRA News how the mayor of Jersey City could support a gun safety survey because the mayor is a retired Marine and his grandparents survived the Holocaust.

Bach is the head of the official New Jersey NRA affiliate organization, Association of New Jersey Rifle and Pistol Clubs, and has served on the NRA board since 2003.

On December 10, Associated Press reported that Jersey City, New Jersey Mayor Steven Fulop included a six question survey about gun safety in instructions for gun vendors to bid on contracts worth $350,000 to provide Jersey City with firearms and ammunition. Among the survey's inquiries are questions about whether the vendor sells assault weapons to the general public and if they take steps to prevent illegal gun trafficking.

Fulop told AP that he hopes other cities will follow his lead of inserting a “social responsibility component” into the bidding process for government contracts:

A 37-year-old former Marine, Fulop said he hopes larger cities will join the effort. Nearly every other industry, from construction to the garment industry, has some social responsibility component, he said, so why not gun manufacturers, dealers and vendors?

On the December 11 episode of NRA News' Cam & Company, Bach claimed that Fulop's survey was evidence he “is not getting it,” in part because his grandparents survived the Holocaust:

BACH: Succeeding [the previous mayor] is a guy named Steve Fulop, who is actually relatively young, but it seems like it's a requirement if you're going to be a Jersey City mayor you have to by default be anti-gun. And here is the interesting thing about this guy, Cam. He's an ex-Marine. Well, what I should say is, he worked for Goldman Sachs in the financial industry and was close to 9-11 when it happened and he was motivated to join the Marines for a few years, which he did. His grandparents were Holocaust survivors according to Wikipedia. So you've got to wonder why he is not getting it.

CAM EDWARDS, HOST: Right.

BACH: And you know, look, I'm calling for a boycott of Jersey City by manufacturers, they should all refuse to fill out this questionnaire. You should not be politicizing the process of procuring firearms for your law enforcement agency, you shouldn't be politicizing that.

Right-wing media and the NRA frequently distort the history of the Holocaust in order to falsely suggest that restrictions on gun ownership in Germany were responsible for Hitler's ascent to power. In a July 2012 interview with Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, a fringe group that has been criticized by the Anti-Defamation League, Bach suggested, “Ironically, Hitler was pro-gun control.”