Dave2 wrote:I don't get it... If someone's afraid of any group of people "rising up", wouldn't they be
for gun control?
Of course, but they forget that the original gun control laws post Civil War were implemented to take guns out of the hands of black people. The white sheriff's charged with enforcing those laws did not enforce them against white people, but it made an easy and convenient way to make sure that whites were armed and blacks were not.
Gun control is racist because it means that people of color who may live in areas of gangs and other destructive influences can no longer defend themselves against those influences. When the only people in your neighborhood who have guns are criminals, your neighborhood goes to hades in a handbasket in short order.
There is no indignity in poverty itself. The indignity is in being at the mercy of predators with no means of making them respect your person and property. I've told this before on these pages, but the neighborhood I moved away from back in California was about 99% black. My family was one of only two white families and maybe 3 or 4 hispanic families in a neighborhood consisting of maybe 10 or 15 blocks disposed in a roughly triangular shape, with a freeway forming the hypotenuse. Of the two sides that were at right angles, the western side ran along the upper edge of the Arroyo Seco, overlooking the Rose Bowl and golf course, and the southern side and the southern end of the hypotenuse bumped into a pretty rough area of gangs and high crime. But my particular neighborhood consisted primarily of middle to lower-middle class black families with stable home lives and steady jobs, with a few families who were really struggling and at or below federal poverty guidelines.
One night, somebody tried to burgle the house of the old Jamaican lady who lived across the street from us,
while she was home. Fortunately, the prospective burglar was not able to pry the iron bars off the side window of her house where he was trying to force an entry, and he gave up and split before he could get caught. So I was talking about the incident with Willa, the 84 year old widowed black woman who was my immediate neighbor. I had made some comment that anybody trying to break into my house was going to get shot. She laughed and said, "Honey, gettin' into
my house is the easy part. It's gettin'
OUT that's going to be hard!" And then she told me that she sleeps with a .22 caliber revolver under her pillow, and she never leaves home without it in her purse. (She drove an absolutely immaculate all original '67 Mustang convertible of which she was the original owner by the way.....and what cop is going to search the purse of a saintly old lady who looks so prim and proper?) Anyway, I suggested to the Jamaican lady that she might want to consider buying a handgun and learn to shoot it, and I told her that I would be very happy to help her pick out something suitable and teach her how to shoot it and handle it safely. She looked at me like I was a benighted fool and said that no, she would just call her son who only lived 5-10 minutes away if something happened again. I said, "you know, a LOT can happen in 5-10 minutes," but she wasn't having any of it. I think it is because she came from a heavily british influenced culture with strict gun control laws, where only criminals have guns. So there is a linking in the minds of such people between gun possession and criminality.
They think that only criminals have guns, so that they can carry out their criminal acts and force their depredations upon others, and that
decent people don't need a gun because they are behaving
decently. There is a huge disconnect when it comes to the idea of decent people
stopping criminal behavior in someone else because they don't want to have to get their hands dirty in that effort. They want to pay somebody
else to do it, and they are willing to pay higher taxes to make that happen; and they don't understand personal freedom arguments because banning guns does not
directly impact them since they don't choose to exercise that right. They don't understand that
one of the reasons our neighborhood was reasonably safe was because a number of the homeowners were also gun owners. It never occurred to her that,
just maybe, the criminal might have chosen to burgle
her home because he had knowledge that she had no guns.
Well, almost all of the black families in my old neighborhood were long-time home owners, and in many cases, the black families that had
built these homes back in the late 1940s were still living in them. Such was the case with the Jamaican lady's neighbors next door neighbor, the Richies, who also lived across the street from us. Mr. Richie was a WW2 combat veteran (370th RCT "Buffalo Soldiers," Italy 1944). He knew full well the value of a firearm, and he had one and knew how to use it.
HE understood exactly what Wayne LaPierre has been repeating, that the only way to stop a bad man with a gun is a good man with a gun.
I would like the cretins who say that gun owners are scared racists try going to my old neighborhood and preaching that manure. Willa and Mr. Richie might well have run them off at gunpoint.
