Confusion reigns on the right about black people and guns
by digby
My piece for Salon yesterday was about the Black Panthers, Ronald Reagan and guns:
It may be apocryphal, but the story goes that in 1967, Gov. Ronald Reagan agreed to sign a California gun control law that made it against the law to walk around in public with a loaded gun after he saw a Black Panther rally. If it’s true, it was probably this rally:
[…]
30 members of the open-carry group the Huey P. Newton gun club did march in the streets of Dallas earlier this week, armed with AR-15s, shotguns and rifles, chanting about Black Power. One of the marchers by the name of Drew X, with the New Black Panther Party, was quoted as saying, “If they don’t get these people under control with this police brutality and this abuse, this gonna be an international crisis.”
And this has the right wing very confused. A quick look around the Internet finds some perfunctory commentary supporting the group’s right to bear arms, but eventually people are pointing out the fact that one cannot be a “felon” and own guns. Finally they get down and dirty with assertions that the demonstrators must be bloods and crips and start whining that African-Americans are racist for mentioning that people of color are particularly at risk from police abuse. And then there are the hilarious jokes like this one: “If black people could get some marksmanship training it would really cut down on the number of innocents killed by stray bullets in certain neighborhoods.”
Read on. Let’s just say that one of the revealing aspects of the whole Ferguson crisis is that the gun proliferation activists are shown to be far less concerned about fighting the government than they are about fighting “certain elements” they believe are endangering society. Just listen to Wayne LaPierre:
We don’t trust government, because government itself has proven unworthy of our trust. We trust ourselves and we trust what we know in our hearts to be right. We trust our freedom. In this uncertain world, surrounded by lies and corruption everywhere you look, there is no greater freedom than the right to survive and protect our families with all the rifles, shotguns, and handguns we want. We know in the world that surrounds us there are terrorists and there are home invaders, drug cartels, carjackers, knockout gamers, and rapers, and haters, and campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse our society that sustains us all.
They don’t trust the government but it’s not because the jackboots are coming to put them in FEMA camps. It’s because they believe it’s failed to protect them from the boogeyman. It’s important to understand the difference.
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