Ben Carson says guns may have stopped Holocaust

US Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson has sparked controversy after suggesting the Holocaust may have been avoided if people had been armed.

"The likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed," he told CNN on Thursday.

An anti-Semitism monitoring group says linking US gun control to the Holocaust is "historically inaccurate".

Mr Carson is polling second in the Republican race behind Donald Trump.

The retired neurosurgeon drew condemnation last month for saying a Muslim should not run for president because Islam was inconsistent with the US constitution.

Gun control laws

During the CNN interview, Mr Carson was asked about part of his new book, A More Perfect Union, where he wrote "through a combination of removing guns and disseminating propaganda, the Nazis were able to carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance".

He was then asked by CNN presenter Wolf Blitzer: "Just clarify, if there had been no gun control laws in Europe at that time, would six million Jews have been slaughtered?"

Mr Carson said he doubted Hitler would have been able to achieve his goals if Germans had been armed at that time.

"I'm telling you that there is a reason that these dictatorial people take the guns first," he added.

The Anti-Defamation League, an anti-Semitism monitoring group, has previously said that drawing comparisons between the gun control debate in the US and the Holocaust was "historically inaccurate and offensive", especially to Holocaust survivors and their families.

In 1943, armed Jews in the Warsaw ghetto fought the Nazis. Jews killed about 20 Nazis, but about 13,000 Jews died in the uprising.

Ben Carson's comments come days after a mass shooting at a college in the US state of Oregon, in which nine people were killed.

Speaking after the attack, Mr Carson said: "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."

Survivors and relatives of gun attacks in the US have described his comments as insensitive.

Mr Carson has defended gun rights as a bulwark against government tyranny and said that mass shootings are a mental health issue.