Fox News' defense of the gun lobby passed into the realm of fiction when host Martha MacCallum told viewers that what usually thwarts school shootings is “when there's a gun introduced into the situation.” She followed up this myth with the long-debunked claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if Hitler hadn't confiscated citizens' firearms.

On the January 16 edition of Fox News' America's Newsroom, MacCallum moderated a discussion between radio host Mike Slater and Fox contributor Jehmu Greene about a new anti-NRA film being produced by Harvey Weinstein.

During the segment, MacCallum broke into the debate to declare that “in most cases” the harm from mass shootings has been mitigated by adding more guns into the fray, saying the shootings generally end “when there's a gun introduced into the situation that stops [the shooters] from what they're doing.”

MacCallum -- echoing a Washington Times column by senior opinion editor and pro-NRA activist Emily Miller -- later intimated that the Holocaust could have been prevented if the citizenry were armed, but “their guns were all confiscated under German law at the time.”

Though MacCallum's statistic is clad as a statement of fact, it is anything but -- a study completed by Mother Jones found that “not one of 62 mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years has been stopped” by an armed civilian.

On the subject of the Holocaust, Alex Seitz-Wald put the Hitler gun confiscation myth to bed in a 2013 Salon post, writing that “the notion...is mostly bogus”:

Unfortunately for LaPierre et al., the notion that Hitler confiscated everyone's guns is mostly bogus. And the ancillary claim that Jews could have stopped the Holocaust with more guns doesn't make any sense at all if you think about it for more than a minute. 

University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt explored this myth in depth in a 2004 article published in the Fordham Law Review. As it turns out, the Weimar Republic, the German government that immediately preceded Hitler's, actually had tougher gun laws than the Nazi regime. After its defeat in World War I, and agreeing to the harsh surrender terms laid out in the Treaty of Versailles, the German legislature in 1919 passed a law that effectively banned all private firearm possession, leading the government to confiscate guns already in circulation. In 1928, the Reichstag relaxed the regulation a bit, but put in place a strict registration regime that required citizens to acquire separate permits to own guns, sell them or carry them.

The 1938 law signed by Hitler that LaPierre mentions in his book basically does the opposite of what he says it did. “The 1938 revisions completely deregulated the acquisition and transfer of rifles and shotguns, as well as ammunition,” Harcourt wrote. Meanwhile, many more categories of people, including Nazi party members, were exempted from gun ownership regulations altogether, while the legal age of purchase was lowered from 20 to 18, and permit lengths were extended from one year to three years.

The law did prohibit Jews and other persecuted classes from owning guns, but this should not be an indictment of gun control in general. Does the fact that Nazis forced Jews into horrendous ghettos indict urban planning? Should we eliminate all police officers because the Nazis used police officers to oppress and kill the Jews? What about public works -- Hitler loved public works projects? Of course not. These are merely implements that can be used for good or ill, much as gun advocates like to argue about guns themselves. If guns don't kill people, then neither does gun control cause genocide (genocidal regimes cause genocide).

That a Fox anchor would mislead the public on the subject of guns is not novel. Last month, Fox's Sean Hannity lied about the prevalence of background checks during a segment about the anniversary of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.