GUN CONTROL IS RACIST
Tyranny, Slavery and Bigotry Disguised as "Common Sense"
When the average person thinks of “gun control”, they probably think of gang members, weeping parents making pleas to uncaring politicians to do something “for the children”, and paranoid white militia members decked out in camouflage and toting black rifles. This image of gun control is very recent, created by a combination of television news and big-budget movies, and power-hungry politicians whose knowledge of guns extends only to the same news and movies. Let us now divorce ourselves from such short-sighted conceptions and take a look at images associated with gun control that have a better basis in historical reality – the Klan in their late 19th-century heyday in the Southern U.S., and the National Socialist German Workers' Party, known by its German abbreviation as the Nazi Party.
What makes the United States a free society? Is it because we have a right to vote, to spend our money as we please (December 23rd, 1913 to the present notwithstanding), or that we have a wonderful Constitution that tells us we are permitted to exercise certain rights? NO. We are free because we live in a society where ordinary people – rich and poor, black and white, straight and gay, young and old, religious and atheistic - who obey the law are able to keep and bear arms. The men who founded this great nation of ours knew first-hand the benefit of having an armed citizenry, instead of restricting the use of arms to a particular class, race, or religion. English common law, as expounded upon by superb thinkers such as Sir William Blackstone and A.V. Dicey, was very clear in defining that ordinary law-abiding citizens were not only allowed to keep and bear their own personal arms, but that keeping and bearing said arms was a good and noble thing to do! Our own Constitution has a very solid basis in English common law, so there is little room for questions as to the place that the Founding Fathers saw for arms in their fledgling nation. Advocates of gun control measures appear to have only a distorted view of the Constitution alone, ignoring all the other writings from its Framers on the subject of arms and their place in a free society.
“When the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually...I ask, who are the militia? They consist of now of the whole people, except a few public officers. But I cannot say who will be the militia of the future day. If that paper on the table gets no alteration, the militia of the future day may not consist of all classes, high and low, and rich and poor.” - George Mason, from the ratifying Convention in Virginia, June 1788
Gun control is not a means to create a peaceful society. It is not a means to “protect the children”, or “promote the public good”, and history reinforces this. The language and approach of gun control advocates may change, but the effects of gun control have proven to be very consistent. The restriction and prohibition of privately-held arms is a surefire way for tyrants to shore up their own power, a method to emasculate and control subject peoples, force slaves to rely on their master for protection, and to have undue and coercive influence over the several citizens of a republic. The most important part of “gun control” is “control”.
In the United States, the first real gun control laws were passed in the wake of the Civil War. Laws that prohibited blacks from possessing or using arms existed for decades into the 1920s and 30s. These laws were designed to keep blacks powerless and terrorized, essentially making them slaves again, in all but name. They were driven from polling places - even if they passed the literacy tests and paid their poll tax – and many other establishments with violence or the threat of violence, specifically because Southern whites knew precisely that there was not a thing those blacks could do about it. Sure, they could have done what we in modern times do – write to our elected officials, create a non-profit grassroots campaign, organize rallies, and promote their cause on Indymedia and Craigslist, but there would be little they could do against armed groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. Here is an excerpt from the Mississippi “black codes”, passed in the latter part of 1865:
“Article 4, §1. Be it enacted,...That no freedman, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her county, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife, and on conviction thereof in the county court shall be punished by fine, not exceeding ten dollars, and pay the costs of such proceedings, and all such arms or ammunition shall be forfeited to the informer; and it shall be the duty of every civil and military officer to arrest any freedman, free negro, or mulatto found with any such arms or ammunition, and cause him or her to be committed to trial in default of bail.” In order to exercise his Second Amendment rights, a “negro” either had to be a member of the US military, or somehow obtain a gun license from a white-dominated (and often Klan-dominated) police bureaucracy. Because the informer would receive all seized arms and ammunition after law enforcement confiscated them from black-owned homes or shops, there was an incentive for police and Klan members to raid those homes and stores.
On top of that, other laws were passed in other states permitting the sale of expensive makes of firearms to “negroes”, such as Winchester revolvers, and the Single- Action Army and Navy revolvers from Colt. This ensured that few, if any, “negroes” or poor whites could afford those guns. If that wasn't enough, whites were also to be punished for supplying blacks with arms:
“Art. 4, ....If any white person shall sell, lend, or give to any freedman, free negro, or mulatto any fire-arms, dirk or bowie knife, or ammunition, or any spirituous or intoxicating liquors, such person or persons so offending, upon conviction thereof in the county court of his or her county, shall be fined not exceeding fifty dollars, and may be imprisoned, at the discretion of the court, not exceeding thirty days.”
If a gun store owner sold a gun to a black man, the owner would likely get a visit from the 1870s equivalent of the BATFE - complete with a no-knock entry, harassment of his wife and children, and possibly shooting his dogs or livestock. Perhaps this is a slight creative license on my part, but such things are certainly not difficult to imagine.
Gun control advocates will yell and scream and shout until they are blue in the face about guns in inner cities – areas that have high concentrations of minority populations. They talk of “accidental shootings” in which innocent children die in the crossfire of gang wars and shootouts with police. However, most urban areas such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and the Washington, D.C. area are all home to both high rates of violent crime and severely restrictive gun control laws. This means there are two main groups of people who have guns: the police, and the criminals who will have guns regardless of how many laws are passed.
The legacy of racism during the Civil Rights Era in the 1960s is still with us today, albeit in a different form than you will learn in any history or sociology class today. The phrase “Saturday Night Special” is in common use by the anti-gun lobby and media to describe cheap, small-caliber handguns of dubious quality. What most people do not realize is that the original phrase was “Niggertown Saturday Night Special”, which was a derogatory term used to describe the handguns popular among urban blacks. The phrase is always used in such a way as to insinuate that the only purpose for these kinds of guns is to commit a crime. This same mentality was behind the laws that outlawed the sale of inexpensive handguns to blacks in the antebellum South, leaving them to buy guns they could never afford. In Robert Sherrill's book The Saturday Night Special, he notes that the 1968 Gun Control Act was passed by a noticeably frightened Congress in response to the heightened racial tensions leading up to and following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Black Panthers' Information Minister Eldridge Cleaver said in 1968: "Some very interesting laws are being passed. They don't name me; they don't say, take the guns away from the niggers. They say that people will no longer be allowed to have guns. They don't pass these rules and these regulations specifically for black people, they have to pass them in a way that will take in everybody" [emphasis mine]. When tyrants want to disarm a particular segment of the population, they will mask their intentions by first restricting firearms for all citizens under the guise of ambiguous concepts like “order” and “public safety”, which brings us to the next subject – gun laws under Germany's Weimar Republic and the rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
Like many citizens of the United States, residents of the liberal Weimar Republic were in favor of a nation-wide gun registration program as a way to combat the rising levels of instability as a result of the radical political movements of National Socialism and Bolshevism. They thought it would be an effective way to control an undesirable segment of the population and promote “public safety”. In addition, a person's ethnicity was also included on the registration form, including “Jew”. When the Nazis became the dominant political force, they were easily able to turn the gun registration program around and control other “undesirables”, such as Jews. Gun control laws, regardless of the intentions of their authors, set a very dangerous precedent that should alarm all those who love freedom.
Like many of the well-meaning German democrats in the early 1930s, a German Jew and Olympic athlete by the name of Alfred Flatow dutifully registered his personal firearms under the Weimar law. A file labeled House Searches of Jews 1938-39, contains Flatow's arrest record. The address of the “crime scene” is the same as the crime scene of the local police station, meaning that Flatow must have been at the police station to surrender his firearms alongside other Jews, under orders by the Berlin chief of police. The report simply cites “possession of weapons” as the crime Flatow was charged with. A further reading of the report lists more ominous details: Flatow's registration papers were kept at another police station approximately 1km away – meaning that the registration records were distributed to other police stations - an officer from the local station was listed as a witness, and Flatow appears to have been taken into “protective custody” or “preventative custody“ by the Gestapo.
The 1928 Weimar Law on Firearms and Ammunition, along with a 1931 revision, stipulated that all firearms and “slashing or stabbing weapons” were to be registered with the local police. Citizens could be ordered to surrender weapons and anything else that could be used as a weapon to police at any time under the “liberal” Weimar Republic's laws. Of course, only the good, democracy-loving citizens registered their weapons, while they were ignored by the Nazis and Bolsheviks, whom the law had been intended to target. Once the Nazis were in a position of centralized executive power, firearm confiscation was incredibly simple. They had their work cut out for them by the well-meaning liberals who drafted the gun laws to prevent the Nazis from becoming too powerful. The Gestapo's 2nd-in-command, Dr. Werner Best, wrote in 1935: “As a rule, we have to assume that firearms in the hands of the Jews represent a considerable danger for the German people.” Now, let us change that statement to a slight degree - As a rule, we have to assume that firearms in the hands of ________ represent a considerable danger for ________.
The blanks have changed over time, but the concept is still the same. Whether it is “blacks” and “whites”, “Jews” and “Germans”, “right-wing extremists” and “all peace-loving Americans”, or “Irish Catholics” and “the good and honorable citizens of the British Empire”, the central idea is the same one that is behind all forms of bigotry, statism, and tyranny. The main purpose of Kristallnacht - “Night of the Broken Glass”, in which National Socialist forces burned, vandalized, and looted Jewish stores, houses, and synagogues – was to look for weapons that eluded the prior confiscations. Once this was accomplished, even the average public school student can tell you what occurred next – the pogroms, the deportations, and the opening of the death camps. It is not difficult to see the chain of events that connect the effort of well-meaning liberals and their gun registration in the name of “public safety” to what we now know as the Holocaust. Of course, today's gun control advocates lack the racial-nationalist motivations of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, but it is obvious that the Jews may have had a better chance to prevent their attempted extermination were a gun registration program – drafted by well-meaning liberals (how curious that begins to sound!) - not in the hands of a tyrannical political ideology. Disarming citizens through laws which most will invariably follow only makes the abuse of the state's police powers that much more convenient and trouble-free. Such laws make the subjects increasingly dependent on the state for protection, and they will be less likely to bite the hand that feeds, even as the state apparatus makes plans for slavery or genocide.
Gun control allows dictators and ideological or racial supremacists a much greater opportunity to establish themselves in positions of power, fortify that power, and target “undesirable” groups and individuals. The underlying dialogue that exists in all gun control efforts by the state is as follows: “We perceive these particular people to be dangerous, so the best way to control and pacify them is to confiscate the means of mayhem and destruction. Order must be restored and public safety must be secured.” The rhetoric insinuates that the targets of gun control are only those who will commit violent acts against society, while the law-abiding, tax-paying Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public have nothing to fear. After all, the “reasonable restrictions” are meant to stop criminals and enemies of the state!
While the gun control laws of today no longer have a racial, ethnic, or religious component, the idea that only some law-abiding people should be able to own guns is the same reasoning behind the Black Codes of the Jim Crow South. Just as our current President looks down on whites “bitterly clinging to guns and religion”, so did Klan deputies, and the Southern lawmakers who enabled them, look down on “Negroes” - with the same kind of condescension, same kind of elitism, same kind of prejudice, and the same kind of authoritarian tendencies. It is not hyperbole in the slightest to claim that gun control advocates have blood on their hands.
by Andrew C. Wright
email: ancwrigh(at)ucsc(dot)edu
Sources:
Tonso, William R. Gun Control: White Man's Law
The Mississippi Black Code (1865).
Halbrook, Stephen. “Arms in the Hands of Jews Are a Danger to Public Safety”: Nazism, Firearm Registration, and the Night of the Broken Glass
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