Gun Control in WWII Europe: What History Warns Us About Disarmament
September 25, 2025
NRA Headquarters, Fairfax, Virginia
August 15, 2025
When xxxxx
September 25, 2025
Thursday, September 25, 2025
6:00 p.m.: Social Hour
7:00 p.m.: Colt AR15 Optics Presentation
8:00 p.m.: Program and Q&A
Location
NRA Headquarters, Fairfax, Virginia
General Admission
Stephen P. Halbrook
Join us for an evening hosted by Virginia Gun Collectors Association with Stephen P. Halbrook, Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, constitutional attorney, and acclaimed historian of firearms law. Halbrook—winner of three cases before the U.S. Supreme Court—will present eye-opening research from his books Gun Control in the Third Reich and Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France, revealing the untold story of how civilian disarmament enabled tyranny in Europe during World War II.
Based on secret German archives, diaries, and newspapers of the time, Halbrook shows how the Nazi regime systematically used gun registration laws to identify and disarm its enemies, leaving political opponents, Jews, and occupied populations defenseless. In France, Nazi forces enforced firearm surrender under threat of execution, yet resistance fighters and ordinary citizens risked everything to defy these orders, holding on to armed resistance movements across the continent.
Following a 20-minute presentation on Colt AR15 Optics, Stephen P. Halbrook will demonstrate how the right to keep and bear arms was more than a legal question, to be followed by an audience Q&A and book signing. The evening will conclude with VGCA’s signature “Show-n-Tell” session.
Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France
Nazi Germany invaded France in 1940. In every occupied town, Nazi soldiers put up posters that demanded that civilians surrender their firearms within twenty-four hours or else be shot. Despite the consequences, many French citizens refused to comply with the order. In Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance, Stephen P. Halbrook tells this story of Nazi repression and the brave French men and women who refused to surrender to it. Taking advantage of a prewar 1935 French gun registration law, the Nazis used registration records kept by the French police to easily locate gun owners to enforce their demand that firearms be surrendered. Countless French citizens faced firing squads for refusing to comply. But many French citizens had resisted the 1935 decree, preventing the Nazis from fully enforcing the confiscation order. Throughout the Nazi occupation, the French Resistance grew, arming itself to conduct resistance activities and fight back against the occupation.
Gun Control in the Third Reich
Based on secret documents from German archives, diaries, and newspapers of the time, Gun Control in the Third Reich presents the definitive, yet hidden history of how the Nazi regime made use of gun control to disarm and repress its enemies and consolidate power.
Gun Control in the Third Reich spans the two decades from the birth of the Weimar Republic in 1918 through Kristallnacht in 1938. The book then presents a panorama of pertinent events during World War II regarding the effects of the disarming policies. And even though in the occupied countries the Nazis decreed the death penalty for possession of a firearm, there developed instances of heroic armed resistance by Jews, particularly the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
