First, a little context...
Every now and then, if you're an avid reader of the news (both traditional sources and non-traditional sources, i.e., blogs), you'll see a prominent black American (let's call him BA1) slandering another prominent black American (call him BA2) as a "race traitor," more often than not because BA1 thinks BA2's political views are not what BA1 considers as "acceptable black opinions." Or sometimes BA1 views BA2 as, um, being an Uncle Tom, or selling out to the eeeevil White Oppressors. Recent examples include Michael Steele, the Republican lieutenant governor of Maryland, being called "Simple Sambo" and being portrayed in blackface by leftist blogger Steve Gilliard, and Harry Belafonte, whose biggest contribution to society is the "Banana Boat Song," calling Army General and Secretary of State Colin Powell a "house slave."
Meanwhile, real race traitors go ignored.
The support of some black organizations and so-called "black leaders" of encroachments on the natural right of self-defense is well-known. For example, you have the NAACP filing suit against various firearm manufacturers for "gun violence" in the black community -- why do they always talk of "gun violence" instead of "criminal violence"? -- and race pimps like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson adopting Handgun Control's talking point that blood will run in the streets with more liberalized concealed-carry laws.
And then there's Washington, D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams. Last year, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Rep. Mark Souder sponsored a bill known as the D.C. Personal Protection Act, which aims to roll back the oppressive gun laws in our nation's capital and thus once again respect the D.C. citizens' natural right of self-defense. Williams called the D.C. Personal Protection Act "an insult to all the people who died in our city due to gun violence."
Such arrogance leaves me speechless. It's bad enough that Washington is the crime-ridden shithole it is, but for Mr. Williams -- a public official who travels around his fiefdom with a contingent of armed-to-the-teeth bodyguards -- to sit there and support the denial of black Washingtonians' most fundamental right is completely beyond the pale. The use of gun laws to deny blacks this right is quite well-documented in Clayton Cramer's paper "The Racist Roots of Gun Control":
Starting in 1751, the French Black Code required Louisiana colonists to stop any blacks, and if necessary, beat "any black carrying any potential weapon, such as a cane."
...Similarly, in the sixteenth century the colony of New Spain, terrified of black slave revolts, prohibited all blacks, free and slave, from carrying arms.
...in the infamous Dred Scott decision, the U.S. Supreme Court showed that it shared this understanding that citizenship excluded blacks, and because of the relationship between citizenship and the carrying of arms:It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.[ Dred Scott v. Sandford , 60 U.S. 393, 417 (1857)]...
...Robert Sherrill - at one time a correspondent for The Nation and a supporter of restrictive gun control laws - argued in his book The Saturday Night Special that fear of armed blacks was the major provocation of the Gun Control Act of 1968:
The Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed not to control guns to but control blacks, and inasmuch as a majority of Congress did not want to do the former but were ashamed to show that their goal was the latter, the result was that they did neither. Indeed, this law, the first gun-control law passed by Congress in thirty years, was one of the grand jokes of our time. [ Robert Sherrill, The Saturday Night Special , (New York, Charterhouse: 1973), 280-91.]
Sherrill failed to provide "smoking gun" evidence for his claim, but there is no shortage of evidence of the level of fear that gripped white America in the late 1960s. The California Legislature adopted a major new arms law in 1967, for the first time prohibiting the open carry of firearms in cities. [ Assembly Office of Research, Smoking Gun: The Case For Concealed Weapon Permit Reform , (Sacramento, State of California: 1986), 6.] This law was pushed over the top by the Black Panthers demonstrating against it - by walking into the Assembly Chamber carrying "pistols, rifles, [and] at least one sawed-off shotgun." [ "Capitol Is Invaded", Sacramento Bee, May 2, 1967, A1, A10.] This of course pushed the law through, in spite of significant opposition from conservative Republicans such as State Senator John G. Schmitz. [ "Bill Barring Loaded Weapons In Public Clears Senate 29-7", Sacramento Bee, July 27, 1967, A6.]
Another piece of evidence that corroborates Sherrill's belief that both liberals and conservatives intended the Gun Control Act of 1968 as race control more than gun control has recently been found. There are strong similarities between the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the 1938 weapons law adopted by Nazi Germany. [ Jim Simkin and Aaron Zelman, "Gun Control": Gateway to Tyranny , (Milwaukee, Wisc., Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership: 1992), is a highly polemical work, but it does provide the full text (in both German and English) of the various weapons laws and regulations adopted by the Weimar Republic and the Nazis from 1928 to 1938.] This is no coincidence; one of the principal authors of the Gun Control Act of 1968 was Sen. Thomas Dodd of Connecticut. After World War II, Dodd was assistant to the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crime trials. [ Sherrill, 67.] Shortly before the Gun Control Act of 1968 was written, Dodd asked the Library of Congress to translate the 1938 German weapons law into English - and Dodd supplied the German text to be translated. [ Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, "The War on Gun Ownership Still Goes On!", Guns & Ammo , [May 1993], 30-31.] Dodd was not a Nazi; he had a reputation as an aggressive federal prosecutor of civil rights violations, and it seems unlikely that any sort of American Holocaust was intended. Nonetheless, it would not be surprising if Dodd found it convenient to adapt a law that had already proven its efficacy at disarming a minority group.
Today is not 1968, so when proponents of restrictive gun control insist that their motivations are color-blind, there is a possibility that they are telling the truth. Nonetheless, there are some rather interesting questions that should be asked today. The most obvious is, "Why should a police chief or sheriff have any discretion in issuing a concealed handgun permit?" Here in California, even the state legislature's research arm-hardly a nest of pro-gunners-has admitted that the vast majority of permits to carry concealed handguns in California are issued to white males....
Gun control advocates today are not so foolish as to promote openly racist laws, and so the question might be asked: "What is the relevance of racist gun control laws of the past?" My concern is that the motivations for disarming blacks in the past are really not so different from the motivations for disarming law-abiding citizens today. In the last century, the rhetoric in support of such laws was that "they" were too violent, too untrustworthy, to be allowed weapons. Today, the same elitist rhetoric regards law-abiding Americans in the same way, as child-like creatures in need of guidance from the government. In the last century, while never openly admitted, one of the goals of disarming blacks was to make them more willing to accept various forms of economic oppression, including the sharecropping system, in which free blacks were reduced to an economic state not dramatically superior to the conditions of slavery.
How hideously ironic that the likes of Messrs. Jackson, Sharpton and Williams support basically the very same measures that have been used throughout world history -- not just here in the United States -- to deny their ancestors and their brothers and sisters from being truly free. Why do they do it? Have they just swallowed the gun-banner Kool-Aid? Are they just looking for a convenient scapegoat on which to blame the myriad troubles of the black community? Have they just completely abandoned the idea of personal responsibility? Could it be all of the above? No matter what, I've always thought it was quite ironic that folks like me were accused of being bigoted and insensitive towards minorities (racial, sexual, religious, etc.) just because of our political beliefs, when the fact is that -- when you look at what is arguably the most fundamental human right, the right of effective self-defense -- it is people like me, and most if not all of my fellow gun owners, who support that right for ALL people, no matter their color, race, sex or beliefs. We're not the ones trying to dis-empower the downtrodden -- it is the people who are always pointing their fingers at us, screaming "RACIST! BIGOT!" who are doing that. And it may well always be just that way, unless the so-called "leaders" in the black and other minority communities have an outbreak of common sense and bone up on their history. But that would require them to abandon the victim mentality, and would eventually lead to the loss of their influences on their respective communities as the members of those respective communities slowly empower and lead themselves, so, unfortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon. And it's a damn shame, too.
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