As the District of Columbia busies itself throwing sand in the gears of the latest Supreme Court ruling, I can't help but be reminded of the Jim Crow laws in the deep south.
I see gun control as fundamentally racist and I'm gonna tell ya why below the fold.
First, a bit about myself: I'm an African-American male raised in Pittsburgh and transplanted to Cedar Rapids. Myself and my son are both avid shooters. I participate in defensive pistol shooting and carry a concealed weapons permit. My son is a qualified expert long-rifle marksman.
I will set aside gun control's undeniably undeniably racist beginnings, as that in itself has no bearing on what I'm talking about today.
When I look at a situation that would attempt to deny me any right set forth in the Constitution based on my skin color, I call that racist.
Now here's my beef:
The argument that presupposes that allowing legal firearm ownership within a predominantly African-American community will result in a bloodbath.
Let's take a look at the cities in America with the most draconian gun control laws. D.C. Chicago. New York. Los Angeles. Philadelphia.
Pick one.
Now let's compare the situation there with the situations in other cities with less gun control measures. Say, for instance every city in Iowa viewed collectively.
Des Moines, the state capital and the largest city in Iowa. There were 522,454 inhabitants in the Des Moines metropolitan area in 2005. In addition to serving as the seat of government, Des Moines is a major Iowa manufacturing city and a center of the insurance business and of much of the state’s printing and publishing activities. Cedar Rapids, which had a 2005 population of 123,119, is an important food-processing center noted for the manufacture of breakfast cereals. Davenport, the largest of the four Quad Cities bordering the Mississippi River, had a population of 98,845. The city is a railroad and manufacturing center. Sioux City, which had a population of 83,148, serves as a commercial center for northwestern Iowa. It is a major railroad junction and specializes in the manufacture of food products. Waterloo is a manufacturing city with a population of 66,483. It specializes in meat-packing and in the manufacture of farm machinery. Iowa City, with 62,887 inhabitants, is the seat of the University of Iowa. Dubuque, on the Mississippi, was one of the earliest settlements in Iowa. It is an industrial and commercial city with 57,798 inhabitants. Council Bluffs, a major railroad center in southwestern Iowa had a population of 59,568. It lies within the metropolitan area of Omaha, Nebraska.
So this urban population within Iowa totaling 1.07 million people have been getting along all these years without gun control measures prevalent in these other cities and haven't been running amok shooting up the scenery.
Now you can try to tell me that either:
A) we'd have even lower crime and gun fatalities if we instituted these same measures
or
B) these gun control cities would spiral out of control if they had the same relaxed standards we have.
Either way, something does not compute. What is so wrong with the citizens of these cities that under equal circumstances they are expected to act like bloodthirsty savages while we are not?
Are the law-abiding citizens in these cities too poor to be trusted with guns?
Or just too black?
Maybe it's something else and one of the gun control advocates can shed some light on the subject for me.
edit some stats to get us all on the same page
some stats to get us all on the same page