A Republican presidential candidate has been condemned for saying that Holocaust victims might have stopped the genocide if they had been armed.

Ben Carson, who is currently polling second in the race to become the Republican contender for next year’s election, said that “the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.

“I’m telling you that there is a reason that these dictatorial people take the guns first.”

The Anti-Defamation League’s national director Jonathan Greenblatt said: “Ben Carson has a right to his views on gun control, but the notion that Hitler’s gun-control policy contributed to the Holocaust is historically inaccurate.

“The small number of personal firearms available to Germany’s Jews in 1938 could in no way have stopped the totalitarian power of the Nazi German state.”

The 64-year-old former neurosurgeon also sparked controversy after the recent shootings at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, when he said that students should have attacked the murderer.

He told Fox News: “I would not just stand there and let him shoot me. I would say, ‘Hey guys, everybody attack him. He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.’”

The massacre claimed the lives of nine students.

In 2018, following a school shooting in Florida, Alaska congressman Don Young claimed Jews would have survived the Holocaust if they had been armed.