Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit thinks Jason Whitlock should get his facts straight before he aligns the NRA with the KKK. I agree. Another important read on the subject of racism and guns would be Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), the case that, along with D.C. v. Heller (2008), finally insured that both federal and state governments must respect an individual’s right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.
Thomas devoted a lot of his opinion to recounting the history of guns and slavery in the South, both pre- and post-Civil War. Here’s a taste of what he wrote:
After the Civil War, Southern anxiety about an uprising among the newly freed slaves peaked. As Representative Thaddeus Stevens is reported to have said, “[w]hen it was first proposed to free the slaves, and arm the blacks, did not half the nation tremble? The prim conservatives, the snobs, and the male waiting-maids in Congress, were in hysterics.” K. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877, p. 104 (1965) (hereinafter Era of Reconstruction).
As the Court explains, this fear led to “systematic efforts” in the “old Confederacy” to disarm the more than 180,000 freedmen who had served in the Union Army, as well as other free blacks. See ante, at 23. Some States formally prohibited blacks from possessing firearms. Ante, at 23–24 (quoting 1865 Miss. Laws p. 165, §1, reprinted in 1 Fleming 289). Others enacted legislation prohibiting blacks from carrying firearms without a license, a restriction not imposed on whites. See, e.g., La. Statute of 1865, reprinted in id., at 280. Additionally, “[t]hroughout the South, armed parties, often consisting of ex-Confederate soldiers serving in the state militias, forcibly took firearms from newly freed slaves.”
Neither the NRA nor gun ownership is racist. Those who would keep guns out of the hands of Otis McDonald and Dick Heller may be however. Otis McDonald is African-American after all.
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