Murphy McCollough, the latest employee whose job it is to try to clean up after Rep. Don Young at taxpayer expense, claims that Young's comments about gun control and the Holocaust were "taken entirely out of context."

That's not true. Young's comments were not taken out of context. 

This is bad as President Donald Trump bragging that he thought he would have run into the Parkland school without a gun to save lives, only to have his press secretary try to deflect the hail of ridicule by saying Trump didn't mean what came out of his mouth.

Instead of lying about this latest example of Youngspeak—now a national story—McCollough should admit that Young said that 50 million people died in Russia because of gun control and that "Jews were put into the oven" because they didn't have guns. Anything less is a falsehood. 

Young is running for re-election and he should stand behind what he says instead of assigning an underling to rewrite recent history. When Young shifts into belligerent mode, there is no telling what will come out of his mouth.

In an Alaska Municipal League event in Juneau last week, the 84-year-old Young was deep into blaming video games and the family structure for school shootings when Dimitri Shein, one of his challengers, asked about the rights of students and families for safety.

Young said, among other things, that 40 years ago kids brought guns to school and there was no problem and that teachers should be armed to keep students safe.

Young said if you ban one type of gun, "Then what else you going to ban? Pistols. Shotguns, long rifles, slingshots and bows and arrows?"

"How many millions of people were shot and killed because they were unarmed? Fifty million in Russia, because their citizens weren't armed. How many Jews were put into the ovens because they were unarmed?"

That's a pretty clear example of Young being misinformed, which is not unusual. 

What we don't need is to have a Young employee claim that those who quoted Young accurately and in context somehow failed or misrepresented reality. If there is a problem with context here, it rests with Young.

What Young meant, according to his spokesman, as quoted by CNN: "He was referencing the fact that when Hitler confiscated firearms from Jewish Germans, those communities were less able to defend themselves."

 "He was not implying that an armed Jewish population would have been able to prevent the horrors of the Holocaust, but his intended message is that disarming citizens can have detrimental consequences. A defenseless people are left up to the mercy of its leaders."

That's what Murphy McCollough said. That's not what Don Young said. Young said that an armed Jewish population would have been able to prevent the horrors of the Holocaust. He said that 50 million people in Russia died because they were not armed.