"The Racist Roots of Gun Control"


A classic article shows that gun control laws are aimed squarely at black and Hispanic minorities. The people who follow gun control laws are not the ones that other people are worried about
It took me a bit to track down the Clayton E. Cramer piece on gun control I was thinking of the other day.

Read this article and I promise that you'll never think of gun control in the same way again.

The historical record provides compelling evidence that racism underlies gun control laws — and not in any subtle way. Throughout much of American history, governments openly stated that gun control laws were useful for keeping blacks and Hispanics "in their place" and for quieting the racial fears of whites.

Racist arms laws predate the establishment of the United States. This is not surprising. Blacks in the New World were often slaves, and revolts against slave owners often degenerated into less selective forms of racial warfare. The perception that free blacks were sympathetic to the plight of their enslaved brothers and the "dangerous" example that blacks could actually handle freedom often led New World governments to disarm all blacks, both slave and free.

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."(1) If a black refused to stop on demand and was on horseback, the colonist was authorized to "shoot to kill."(2) In Louisiana, the fear of Indian attack and the importance of hunting to the colonial economy necessitated that slaves sometimes possess firearms. The colonists had to balance their fear of the Indians against their fear of their slaves. As a result, French Louisiana passed laws that allowed slaves and free blacks to possess firearms only under very controlled conditions.(3) Similarly, in the sixteenth century the colony of New Spain, terrified of black slave revolts, prohibited all blacks, free and slave, from carrying arms.(4)

Often the relationship between racism and gun control was direct and obvious. On other occasions the connection was more complex. One example of a complex relationship between economic struggle, slavery, and possession of arms can be found in seventeenth-century Virginia. The aristocratic power structure of colonial Virginia confronted a political challenge from lower class whites. These poor whites resented how the men who controlled the government used that power to concentrate wealth into a small number of hands. These wealthy feeders at the government trough would have disarmed poor whites, but the threat of both Indian and pirate attack made this impractical; all white men "were armed and had to be armed."(5) Instead of empowering poor whites, blacks, who had occupied a poorly defined status between indentured servant and slave, were reduced to hereditary chattel slavery. In this way poor whites could be economically advantaged without the upper class having to give up its privileges.(6)

Nor is this something that happened only in the distant past. Read on further in the article.

The case might be made that the government attempted to make the tenants safe by unconstitutional means — that the intentions were good even if the methods were wrong. But even for the "special case" of housing projects, there are profound inconsistencies in the policy. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros in a press conference on February 4, 1994, attempted to justify the warrantless searches as protecting the tenants of these crime-ridden projects. Cisneros, however, admitted that "[c]rime statistics . . . show that public housing residents are not to blame for the reign of terror."(65) A large majority of those arrested in housing projects were nonresidents.(66) It is therefore all the more amazing that the residents, who would presumably have much to fear from these armed nonresident criminals, are the ones that the Clinton administration seeks to disarm.

If we examine these Clinton administration policies as a pragmatic response to crime, we must ask: why disarm the likely victims of the criminals? But if we consider these inexplicable policies as the latest symptom of racist attitudes about violence, then these policies make much more sense.

Get that? The nation's first "black" President, the guy who loudly proclaimed that "I feel your pain," aimed his gun control policy squarely at those who needed defending the most.

Remember, government authority tends to be used against those least able to resist. And if FedGovs disarmed you, you are certainly less able to resist.

Libertarians will tell you that it is not "gun control," it is victim disarmament. The simple fact that almost everyone overlooks in the gun control debate is that the people who obey the laws are not the ones who we worry about.

I've called myself a reluctant gun advocate. It was probably the last libertarian principle I adopted, and not without soul-searching. This article was one of the things that convinced me. Another was finding out that all those National Guard armories built around the country were put there in part to keep the population from rising up against unpopular laws, which Americans have a history of doing.

But do you know what really got me? Finding out that the Gun Control Act of 1968 was lifted mostly from a Nazi gun control law used to disarm Jews in Germany before World War II. You can find out some of the details of that particular con-game at Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

You can't separate the right to bear arms from the other rights in the Bill of Rights. The only thing that keeps government in line is fear and respect of it's citizens. That fear and respect diminish rapidly without the firepower from the citizens to back it up.

Otherwise you have early morning SWAT raids at the wrong addresses and no way to hold the police accountable.

As freedom activist Claire Wolfe points out, gun permits are crap. You don't (yet) ask for a permit for freedom of speech, why should you have to beg for a permit to carry a gun? Concealed or not?

Remember, the people who are likely to follow a gun control law are not the ones that other people worry about.


— NeoWayland

Posted: Sat - August 12, 2006 at 03:50 PM  Tag


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