Blogs
Jan 21, 2013 at 9:06 am
Comments
Please wait...
Comments are closed.
Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.
Editors' Picks
is a proud member of the
media network
media network
All contents © Index Newspapers LLC
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
Or, uh, I don't know... maybe Martin Luther King WOULD be alive today if we did a better job of keeping guns out of the hands of mentally unbalanced people who are determined to use them to kill people. The fact that he doesn't see the incongruity of referencing a guy who was shot down in a cold blooded assassination to defend the right for everyone to have a gun is... telling.
"Ah, so you support the Black Panther Party then?"
What other means can we come up with in which Africans could have escaped slavery, in wildly speculative and history-independent scenarios?
There's a strain of victimhood running through conservatism in general (it's implicit in a lot of Fox News rhetoric), but I don't see this argument as equating gun owners to slaves.
:|
The NRA would say that if MLK had a gun with him, he would have been able to defend himself and he'd be alive today. He's dead today because he was a non-violent, peace-loving liberal.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DyZM6RfG9mo/UP…
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arch…
But here's the thing of it: liberal constituents have historically had a damn good reason to whine, and they were legitimately victims.
Conservatives, on the other hand,are largely white, Christian and male (joined of course by their long-suffering, dim-witted wives, and women who hate other women). They are not in the least oppressed in the traditional sense, and the hardship they do suffer they largely bring upon themselves by voting for sociopaths. But they live such dull little lives that supposing themselves victims is quite attractive to them.
I don't think "Gun Nuts" see themselves as an oppressed group of people. I think they view themselves as a group of people who refuse to open themselves up to oppression. And for anyone who doesn't think that firearms have aided the Civil Rights movement, I suggest you do some research on the Black Panthers or the Monroe, NC chapter or the NAACP.
There's also a great little story about an african american fella named Robert F. WIlliams, who along with 1 passenger and a few firearms, were able to hold off a violent mob of racist rednecks that were aided by local police, until state troopers were able to escort themselves to safety.
Fact is, the gun-control movement began to keep guns out of the hands of minorities and newly freed slaves. Conversely, it's earliest opponents were civil rights groups and people of color who needed protection when the government either wouldn't help them, or were actively oppressing them. You can divorce guns from MLK, but they were an important part of the civil rights movement.
Cite needed.
Firearms might have helped native Africans from becoming slaves in the first place, but it is more likely that the coast Africans would have received the guns first and just used them to bring more slaves from the interior.
Once they were in the United States, having the "right" to bear arms wouldn't have actually gotten them any arms without any means to procure them. As @26 points out, it isn't like anyone was going to give them firearms!
On the other hand, if the Aztecs had firearms when they met the Spaniards, we might all still be sacrificing virgins to various gods. (Maybe that would have ultimately been a better world, I don't know.)
Also, if the inhabitants of Hispanolia had firearms when Christopher Columbus came along, they might have been able to avert the destruction of their people. Same thing for the various tribes of Native Americans.