In a stunning twist on reality, Rahm Emmanuel's chief of police in Chicago actually claimed that removing checks on the Second Amendment rights of Americans was a form of RACISM?
“So here’s what I want to tell you. See, let’s see if we can make a connection here. Slavery. Segregation. Black codes. Jim Crow. What did they all have in common? Anybody getting’ scared? Government sponsored racism. I told you I wasn’t afraid [of race]. I told you I wasn’t afraid.”Now I want you to connect one more dot on that chain of the African American history in this country, and tell me if I’m crazy: Federal gun laws that facilitate the flow of illegal firearms into our urban centers across this country, that are killing our black and brown children.”
Um...yes, dude.You're crazy. Or just ignoring history:
OPPOSITION TO GUN CONTROL was what drove the black militants to visit the California capitol with loaded weapons in hand. The Black Panther Party had been formed six months earlier, in Oakland, by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. Like many young African Americans, Newton and Seale were frustrated with the failed promise of the civil-rights movement. Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were legal landmarks, but they had yet to deliver equal opportunity. In Newton and Seale’s view, the only tangible outcome of the civil-rights movement had been more violence and oppression, much of it committed by the very entity meant to protect and serve the public: the police.
Inspired by the teachings of Malcolm X, Newton and Seale decided to fight back. Before he was assassinated in 1965, Malcolm X had preached against Martin Luther King Jr.’s brand of nonviolent resistance. Because the government was “either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property” of blacks, he said, they had to defend themselves “by whatever means necessary.” Malcolm X illustrated the idea for Ebony magazine by posing for photographs in suit and tie, peering out a window with an M-1 carbine semiautomatic in hand. Malcolm X and the Panthers described their right to use guns in self-defense in constitutional terms. “Article number two of the constitutional amendments,” Malcolm X argued, “provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.”
Most people think King would be the last person to own a gun.Yet in the mid-1950s, as the civil rights movement heated up, King kept firearms for self-protection. In fact, he even applied for a permit to carry a concealed weapon. A recipient of constant death threats, King had armed supporters take turns guarding his home and family. He had good reason to fear that the Klan in Alabama was targeting him for assassination.
William Worthy, a journalist who covered the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reported that once, during a visit to King's parsonage, he went to sit down on an armchair in the living room and, to his surprise, almost sat on a loaded gun. Glenn Smiley, an adviser to King, described King's home as "an arsenal."
As I found researching my new book, Gunfight, in 1956, after King's house was bombed, King applied for a concealed carry permit in Alabama. The local police had discretion to determine who was a suitable person to carry firearms. King, a clergyman whose life was threatened daily, surely met the requirements of the law, but he was rejected nevertheless. At the time, the police used any wiggle room in the law to discriminate against African Americans.
"The Deacons for Defense and Justice was formed by African-American men in Jonesboro and Bogalusa, Louisiana, and Natchez, Mississippi. They were factory workers, farmers, common laborers, fathers, husbands, and church-goers who organized to protect themselves and their communities from the terrorism and oppression of the Ku Klux Klan organizations, White Citizens Councils, and police agencies."
There is little doubt that the earliest gun controls in the United States were blatantly racist and elitist in their intent. San Francisco civil-liberties attorney Don B. Kates, Jr., an opponent of gun prohibitions with impeccable liberal credentials (he has been a clerk for radical lawyer William Kunstler, a civil rights activist in the South, and an Office of Economic Opportunity lawyer), describes early gun control efforts in his book Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptic Speak Out. As Kates documents, prohibitions against the sale of cheap handguns originated in the post-Civil War South. Small pistols selling for as little as 50 or 60 cents became available in the 1870s and '80s, and since they could be afforded by recently emancipated blacks and poor whites (whom agrarian agitators of the time were encouraging to ally for economic and political purposes), these guns constituted a significant threat to a southern establishment interested in maintaining the traditional structure.
Consequently, Kates notes, in 1870 Tennessee banned "selling all but 'the Army and Navy model' handgun, i.e., the most expensive one, which was beyond the means of most blacks and laboring people." In 1881, Arkansas enacted an almost identical ban on the sale of cheap revolvers, while in 1902, South Carolina banned the sale of handguns to all but "sheriffs and their special deputies--i.e., company goons and the KKK." In 1893 and 1907, respectively, Alabama and Texas attempted to put handguns out of the reach of blacks and poor whites through "extremely heavy business and/or transactional taxes" on the sale of such weapons. In the other Deep South states, slavery-era bans on arms possession by blacks continued to be enforced by hook or by crook.
So much for that.
Horace Boothroyd III posted a diary that was concerning to me,about a gun at #occupyportland that resulted in an arrest.
This afternoon, Wednesday October 19, 2011, at 3:39 p.m., Portland Police officers responded to the report of a man arguing with people at Southwest 4th and Salmon Street, next to the Lownsdale Park encampment of Occupy Portland. Officers arrived in the area and learned that the man displayed a handgun and walked towards 3rd and Salmon. Officers located the man at 3rd and Salmon and he was taken into custody. A firearm has been recovered.
Officers arrested 32-year-old Jason Charles Parker and charged him with one count of Disorderly Conduct in the Second Degree.
Officers learned that Parker walked to the area of Lownsdale Park and was taking video of the Occupy Portland encampment when he was verbally challenged by several occupants of the park. A verbal exchange between Parker and several people in the park followed, with one of the occupants using a racial slur directed at Parker. At some point during the verbal exchange, Parker revealed a handgun in his waistband.
Parker is a concealed handgun license holder.
Parker was booked into the Multnomah County Jail and his photo should be available shortly at www.mcso.us
Portland Police would still like to speak with anyone who witnessed the incident or recorded video of the incident. Anyone with this information is encouraged to call Central Precinct at (503) 823-0097.
I want to be clear about my views on this.
In an anti-rights diary posted earlier today,to which I will not link, one commenter said:
Meanwhile, the concealed carry crowd, who love to portray themselves as paragons of propriety, had one of their members arrested yesterday in Portland for losing his head during an argument at the Occupy Portland event (where he was recording video of protesters). He showed his gun, evidently to intimidate and/or threaten those with whom he was arguing, and then left the area.
Police arrested him shortly thereafter for disorderly conduct.
Do you see the naked bigotry in this?
"Concealed carry crowd."This commenter seeks to lump me in with this nimrod who did something I would never do, and that is display a firearm with no good reason.
And thus the disorderly conduct arrest, which to me seems 100% justified.
Now this guy was probably not an #occupy supporter.Be that as it may I want to give my views on #occupy and gun rights,and they may surprise you.
Yes, you have the right to keep and bear arms.
But injecting that into the #occupy movement is just plain STUPID.
It provides an excuse for more law enforcement overreach and feeds the right.
I feel VERY strongly that open display of firearms by liberal gun rights activists at #occupy events is not the thing to do.
Give the police and the right a monopoly on violence and its means, this time.
But anyway......
What's your opinion? Please leave a comment. >;)