Blind squirrel, nut
Courtland Milloy may need a gun to back up his inflammatory rhetoric. He looks at Thomas, race and gun control:
In a scorcher of an opinion that reads like a mix of black history lesson and Black Panther Party manifesto, he goes on to say, “Militias such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, the White Brotherhood, the Pale Faces and the ’76 Association spread terror among blacks. . . . The use of firearms for self-defense was often the only way black citizens could protect themselves from mob violence.”
This was no muttering from an Uncle Tom, as many black people have accused him of being. His advocacy for black self-defense is straight from the heart of Malcolm X. He even cites the slave revolts led by Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner — implying that white America has long wanted to take guns away from black people out of fear that they would seek revenge for centuries of racial oppression.
July 2nd, 2010 at 10:09 am
“Taking the guns away” was not limited to blacks.
The “roped nations,” the American Indian tribes who fell into captivity, were also disarmed. Often more thoroughly and far more brutally than former slaves. After all, the freedmen usually had at least had a sympathetic relationship with their former masters to fall back on, while the Cheyenne and other Nations were seen as nothing more than targets for extermination.
And of course, there is a little matter of the Irish, who were often searched for weapons as they desperately tried to find work in “Amerikay.” Usually fruitlessly, because any weapon the “Harps” had was confiscated at the port of entry.
I could go on at length, but the bottom line is pretty simple. Given a different background, Thomas could have as easily shown gun control to be based on any of several varieties of racism.
And yes, Thomas opinion deserves a careful examination by everyone who thinks “gun control” is desirable.
Unfortunately, Milloy knows little of history, and it shows.
Stranger
July 2nd, 2010 at 11:11 am
While it is true that more than blacks were disarmed by laws written post Civil War, it cannot be argued that the laws were not racist. Georgia Carry hosts a special report on Georgia’s gun laws [url=http://www.georgiacarry.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/racist-roots-of-ga-gun-laws.pdf]here.[/url]
July 2nd, 2010 at 11:25 am
OK, Stranger kind of beat me to it. Milloy has written many subtly and not so subtly anti-gun articles for the Washington [Com]Post. He is also one of those unfortunate souls that sees every issue through a racial filter – as is plainly clear from the article istself. He thinks nothing of infringing the rights of 300 million law-abiding Americans to keep a few thousand drug addled inner city thugs from knocking each other off. Milloy is ignorant of history and is _painfully_ ignorant of the history of the gun rights movement. His notion that Thomas’ arguments are original is laughable; particularly as the article he himself wrote points out that Thomas’ strongest points are punctuated using historical quotes. Then after all that, Milloy completely misses the whole point of Thomas’ differing opinion: that the correct way to incorporate the 2nd is through ‘privileges and immunities’ (as Gura argued), and that the reason they didn’t ‘acknowledge’ it was because they chose the easy road of incorporation through due process: mainly to avoid upsetting an apple cart full of 130 years of bad precedent and government overreach. In short: Courtland Milloy is a mental midget.
July 2nd, 2010 at 12:28 pm
I gotta get me some racial colored glasses. I didn’t get that at all from Thomas’s opinion.
I saw a linear, cogent argument demonstrating why the 14th amendment came about and why it extended the “privileges and immunities,” which he shows was common language for rights, guaranteed by the Constitution cannot be infringed by the States. Sure he references a group having been contemporaneously acknowledged as citizens who were routinely denied their federally enumerated privileges and immunities by State laws. This denial led to the addition of the 14th amendment to the Constitution to ensure that everyone knew the federal enumerated rights could not be infringed by the States. Oh, and this group, was made up of non-white people.
Sad for Mr. Milloy, the opinion had little to do with Black Power and everything to do with equality of citizens regardless of race, creed, or national origin.
July 2nd, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Another provision of the 14th Amendment is “the equal protection of the laws”, but the elite ruling class doesn’t adhere to that lest, for example, the citizen disarmament laws they want for us apply to them too.