“It is perhaps counterintuitive to say so but gun control responses to mass killings – whether racially motivated or otherwise – are a deep mistake. The standard form of gun control means writing more criminal laws, creating new crimes, and therefore creating more criminals or more reasons for police to suspect people of crimes. More than that, it means creating yet more pretexts for a militarized police, full of racial and class prejudice, to overpolice.
As multiple police killings of unarmed black men have reminded us, the police already operate with barely constrained force in poor, minority neighborhoods. From SWAT to stop-and-frisk to mass incarceration to parole monitoring, the police manage a panoply of programs that subject these populations to multiple layers of coercion and control. As a consequence, more than 7 million Americans are subject to some form of correctional control, an extremely disproportionate number of whom are poor and minority.”
– Gun control’s racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power | Salon
Another good read on this subject:
THE (REALLY, REALLY) RACIST HISTORY OF GUN CONTROL IN AMERICA
“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience.”
— Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)
“It is perhaps counterintuitive to say so but gun control responses to mass killings – whether racially motivated or otherwise – are a deep mistake. The standard form of gun control means writing more criminal laws, creating new crimes, and therefore creating more criminals or more reasons for police to suspect people of crimes. More than that, it means creating yet more pretexts for a militarized police, full of racial and class prejudice, to overpolice.
As multiple police killings of unarmed black men have reminded us, the police already operate with barely constrained force in poor, minority neighborhoods. From SWAT to stop-and-frisk to mass incarceration to parole monitoring, the police manage a panoply of programs that subject these populations to multiple layers of coercion and control. As a consequence, more than 7 million Americans are subject to some form of correctional control, an extremely disproportionate number of whom are poor and minority.”
– Gun control’s racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power | Salon
My Guns Saved My Life when the state and the liberals left me to die. – The Mockingbird
I own firearms. I’m a leftist. Not a #feelthebern leftist. Bernie is too far to the right for me. Because of my politics, men have come to my home to kill me. This has happened more than once. When it did happen the only things that saved my life, and the lives of my roommates, were training and the physical possession of effective tools.
I’ll tell one story that will put the current clamor for more control on everyone and everything in perspective. I was actively organizing against the KKK and other white supremacists. So were my roommates and my entire social circle. The FBI attempted to contact me but claimed they could not find me. They got a call from a payphone via an intermediary. The agent, tired and wishing he didnt have to do this said “I am required by statute to inform you that we have credible threats against your life from white power groups.” He got my lawyer’s phone number. I was not going to talk to him.
It was really clear that the FBI would rather bungle the investigation of my death than prevent it. We detected the surveillance attempts by the white supremacists. We allowed their surveillance to see that we were well armed. They went away. The FBI did not have us under surveillance. There was a police precinct house three blocks away. The police were never on our block. We were being set up to die.
The FBI knew what these guys were up to. The FBI knew where we were because these nazis did. Planning to murder someone in conjunction with another person and then putting your target under surveillance is a felony. It is conspiracy to commit murder. The FBI could have arrested and prosecuted these guys at any time. The FBI did not do so. The police were actively not present. The FBI did what was the barest minimum. We saved our own lives and we only could do so because we were armed.
This was not the only time in my life this happened.
Pro-gun gay group wins major victory: ‘Armed queers don’t get bashed’
May 19 2016
The Pink Pistols’ homepage states it succinctly: “We teach queers to shoot. Then we teach others that we have done so.”
Their motto: “Pick on someone your own caliber.”
The group, which advocates for gay Americans to carry firearms, just won a major victory on Tuesday: a federal judge in Washington halted enforcement of a portion of the city’s strict gun law, ordering Washington DC police to stop requiring residents to demonstrate they have “a good reason to fear injury,” which he ruled places “an unconstitutional burden” on citizens’ right to bear arms.
The Pink Pistols challenged the city’s requirement that a person who wants to carry a concealed handgun outside the home show he or she has a “good reason to fear injury to his or her person or property” or another “proper reason” for carrying the weapon.
U.S. District Court Judge Richard J. Leon characterized the city’s law as an “understandable, but overly zealous, desire to restrict the right to carry in public a firearm for self-defense to the smallest possible number of law-abiding, responsible” citizens.
Charles Cooper, an attorney representing the shooting group, said Tuesday he was “really gratified” by the ruling.
By Rebecca Onion
The history of black responses to the violence of 1919—which ranged from the use of a single weapon against a home invader, to the organization of defensive posses like Davis’ that were meant to protect potential victims of lynching, to the deployment of groups of men who patrolled city streets during unrest—makes it clear that armed self-defense, far from being an invention of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement, is a strategy with deep roots. As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the civil rights movement, the story of nonviolence—a beautiful strategy with uncontestable moral force—has taken center stage. However the story of active self-defense against violence—a tradition that developed before, and then alongside, nonviolent resistance—is too often dismissed or simply ignored. Even before slavery had been outlawed, black Americans took up arms when their lives and livelihoods were threatened. Their experiences make the familiar history of marches and peaceful protest more complex. But the story of the civil rights struggle is incomplete without them.
“A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.“
—Ida B. Wells-Barnett
By Chaz Quigley
On Saturday, April 2 in the southern sector of Dallas, Texas, counter-protestors occupied the streets outside the Nation of Islam’s Muhammed Mosque #48 to challenge the arrival of an armed right-wing white nationalist organization known as the Bureau of American-Islamic Relations (BAIR).
BAIR had planned to convene upon the mostly Black neighborhood in an act of retaliation for the perceived “anti-patriotic” rhetoric of the Nation of Islam and its supporters. The seething tensions had put the increasingly militarized local police force on high alert with helicopters, armored cars, snipers, and more than fifty officers deployed for “crowd control” in case of violence.
The police stood on the opposing side of the boulevard in front of barricades set in place to shield the undersized posse of eight white supremacists whose bodies seemed overburdened in weapons: some simultaneously armed with revolvers in their holsters, assault rifles, shotguns, and handguns of varying caliber. I could see three police snipers on top of a local barbecue restaurant who had their marks pointed towards the area where some of the Black community activists stood.
I am not a pacifist. My sense of justice runs far too deep for me to subscribe to ridiculous notions of nonviolence. I have been a peacemaker since childhood. I was always the kid who separated squabbling classmates and negotiated an end to conflict between the two parties involved. I have also have never been one to back down from defending myself. I have had to knockout more than my fair share of homophobes who thought I’d be an easy target for their bullshit.
I don’t like guns. Because my teenage father thought it was a good idea to point a BB gun at his toddler, one of my earliest memories is of a loud popping noise and blood pouring from my arm. I try to avoid being casual about tools of mayhem and death, but I was giddy at the sight of a bunch badass looking, shit-talking young Black militants stepping onto the scene in hard army gear with cool sleek assault rifles and twelve-gauge shotguns thrown across their backs. The thought of a ragtag group of xenophobic assholes getting a well-deserved bashing gave me goosebumps.
The Black counter-protestors were a group called Huey P. Newton Gun Club, named for one of founders, Huey P. Newton, of the notorious Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. In the ’70s, Newton opened health clinics, operated a free school for children living in inner-city poverty and advocated for the rights of Black people to armed self-defense in the face of white supremacy and police brutality. No one was certain what the police response would be to the appearance of law-abiding Black people who were proudly exercising their Second Amendment rights.
As quickly as the BAIR organization showed up, within five minutes of seeing a crowd of amped Black people- some as heavily armed as themselves- they left. The crowd roared in victory with ferocious chants of “Black Power! Brown Power! All Power to The People!” There was a dreamy, cinematic quality to all of it.
