New Hampshire state representatives were attacked as “Nazis” during a recent public hearing of the House Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety. This is the most blatant, local expression of a concerted National Rifle Association campaign dating back, at least, to 1968.

This campaign relies on falsehoods and misrepresentations to distort the history of the Holocaust, going so far as to claim that the genocide of the Jews would not have happened if they had been armed. It deceptively asserts that Hitler pursued a path of increasing gun control as he consolidated his power between 1933 and 1938. It also asserts that he was able to get away with this because the German public, and particularly the Jews, gave up their rights to own and use firearms.

The campaign’s fabrication is monumentally disrespectful to the victims of the Holocaust and a self-serving contortion of history. It has been crafted to energize a larger NRA message that is at the core of the gun lobby’s ability to mobilize resistance to all firearms regulation.

The NRA constantly insists that unfettered access to firearms is the only way to protect our country from tyrannical government. It has refashioned Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship into a powerful symbol of this feared destiny. It markets this fate as the inevitable consequence of any further firearms regulations implemented anywhere in the United States.

From this Nazi-infused perspective, the very idea of “sensible” firearms regulation is contemptible. These regulations have already pushed our country down the “slippery slope” toward a firearms database that will certainly be used to confiscate all privately owned firearms, so the stakes couldn’t be higher. The NRA insists that we need to keep these firearms hidden from any public accounting to protect us from the Nazis of the future.

Any effort to apply more regulation must be blocked to save us from that asserted future, even at the cost of putting the public in danger.

A fundamental way that crying “Nazi” increases public danger is starkly obvious when considering the matter of gun-related crime and what it takes to effectively investigate and prosecute it or prevent it.

Criminal investigations are most likely to succeed when they have the resources to move quickly. Firearms recovered from a crime scene need to be readily and accurately traced to their origins. Anything that slows down this trace increases the risk that any one of us might be the next victim of a gun-related crime.

Yet, time and again the NRA has intentionally impeded the modernization of the trace process to protect us from the Nazis.

The ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, was formed in 1972, partly to support criminal investigations and reduce the theft, trafficking and loss of firearms. In 1974, the ATF restructured its tracing capabilities and created the National Gun Tracing Center. It is the nation’s sole source of trace data for all national and international requests and its workload has steadily increased.

Since the beginning, the NRA has lobbied successfully to undercut the ATF. Because of NRA efforts, the tracing center cannot develop computerized databases or adequately preserve and catalogue the paper records it must use instead.

The timely review of licensed dealer inventories to clarify the extent of firearms theft is not allowed. The ATF has no authority to enforce federal laws requiring licensed dealers to report firearm theft and loss.

The tracing center has no access to the information acquired through the instant background check done on all firearms buyers. All that data has to be destroyed within 24 hours of the sale.

This is a brief sample of ways the NRA has undercut the ATF and the results are disturbingly clear. The tracing center is chronically underfunded, understaffed and faces an accelerating workload. It processed 2,372 total trace requests in 1989. It processed 443,383 requests in 2018. Approximately 700,000,000 paper documents are archived at the center in boxes and shipping containers. None of the center’s data is entered into a computerized database.

The FBI calculated that over 31,000 firearms were stolen from U.S. dealers between 2012 and 2016. Data from the overlapping period of 2010 to 2015 indicated investigators had recovered over 9,700 firearms from crime scenes that could be traced back to a known theft from a dealer.

No one has a clear idea of how many dealer thefts went unreported and how many of those firearms were then involved in criminal events.

Firearm theft from private owners is a far greater problem. The Bureau of Justice Statistics within the Department of Justice estimated that 1.4 million privately owned firearms were stolen from 2005 to 2010. Only 14% were recovered within six months.

The FBI estimated that 1.1 million privately owned firearms were stolen from 2012 to 2015. The ATF can recommend ways to reduce the risk of theft to dealers, but has no authority to implement any program.

On average, it takes several years for a firearm to end up at a crime scene, but each theft increases the likelihood of that happening. Each stalled investigation allows a criminal more time to victimize others.

The NRA successfully promotes the imagined danger of a possible national destiny in the form of a Nazi dictatorship. This imagined danger puts all of us in actual danger.

This danger takes many forms beyond criminal victimization, but it is not a possibility in the future. It is a reality now, and those who cry “Nazi” help to create it.

(David Coursin of Northwood represents Rockingham District 1 in the New Hampshire House of Representatives.)