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Health & Fitness

Racism and Gun Control: NRA Created To Protect Free Slaves

Racism, NRA, gun control, 1968...what's the story behind gun control and racism?

Surprise, surprise.

And here you were this whole time a thinkin' that we Second Amendment folks were out to support racism. Well...now you know better.

And take a moment or two to consider the 1968 Gun Control Act, which I believe was firmly aimed at keeping guns from black Americans. Yes. Gun control, in my eyes, is racist in certain applications. Like when Democrats want it.

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There are other examples of remarkable honesty from the state supreme courts on this subject. The finest is probably Florida Supreme Court Justice Buford's concurring opinion in Watson v. Stone. In Watson, a conviction for carrying a handgun without a permit was overturned because the handgun was in the glove compartment of a car.  Justice Buford wrote:

I know something of the history of this legislation. The original Act of 1893 was passed when there was a great influx of negro laborers in this State drawn here for the purpose of working in turpentine and lumber camps. The same condition existed when the Act was amended in 1901 and the Act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers and to thereby reduce the unlawful homicides that were prevalent in turpentine and saw-mill camps and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied.    

There is a shortage of such forthright statements of racist intent behind modern gun control laws. But has the racist intent disappeared, or simply been recast into a more acceptable form? Robert Sherrill, at one time a correspondent for The Nation and a supporter of restrictive gun control laws, argued in his book The Saturday Night Special that fear of armed blacks was the major provocation of the Gun Control Act of 1968. He argues:

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The Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed not to control guns to but control blacks, and inasmuch as a majority of Congress did not want to do the former but were ashamed to show that their goal was the latter, the result was that they did neither. Indeed, this law, the first gun-control law passed by Congress in thirty years, was one of the grand jokes of our time.

Sherrill failed to provide "smoking gun" evidence for his claim, but there is no shortage of evidence of the level of fear that gripped white America in the late 1960s. The California Legislature adopted a major new arms law in 1967, for the first time prohibiting the open carrying of firearms in cities.  This law easily passed after the Black Panthers demonstrated against it — by walking into the Assembly Chamber carrying "pistols, rifles, [and] at least one sawed-off shotgun."  This demonstration of course pushed the law through, in spite of significant opposition from conservative Republicans such as State Senator John G. Schmitz.

Another piece of evidence that corroborates Sherrills belief that both liberals and conservatives intended the Gun Control Act of 1968 as race control more than gun control has recently been found. There are strong similarities between the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the 1938 weapons law adopted by Nazi Germany. This similarity is no coincidence; one of the principal authors of the Gun Control Act of 1968 was Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut. After World War II, Dodd was assistant to the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crime trials.  Shortly before the Gun Control Act of 1968 was written, Dodd asked the Library of Congress to translate the 1938 German weapons law into English.   Dodd supplied the German text.  Dodd was not a Nazi; he had a reputation as an aggressive federal prosecutor of civil rights violations. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that any sort of American Holocaust was intended. Nonetheless, it would not be surprising if Dodd found it convenient to adapt a law that had already proven its efficacy at disarming a minority group.

 

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