| inbluevt | Date: Monday, 2013/07/22, 5:17 PM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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For some years, the N.R.A.’s approach to gun-rights advocacy has amounted to a variant of the old Maoist dictum, to the effect that
democracy flows from the barrel of a gun. In March, the group provided a
novel twist on the theme of sidearm liberty when it débuted an ad
featuring Colion Noir, a young African-American in a low-slung baseball
cap, who offered a series of one-liners to explain why he supports gun
rights. First among his arguments is the idea that it is absurd for
African-Americans to oppose gun access, given the history of racial
violence that characterized segregation. Around the time the ad was
released, the N.R.A.’s president, David Keene, told an interviewer that
African-Americans should recognize that gun-control policy dates back to
the attempts to disarm blacks after the Civil War. There’s a neat logic
to the N.R.A.’s marketing push: the gun is an essential implement of
democracy, so gun rights should appeal to people whose history has been
defined by the struggle to achieve civil rights.
Four months after the ad appeared, a Florida jury found George Zimmerman not guilty in the shooting death, last year, of Trayvon Martin. That
death was the by-product of a toxic environment of racial profiling,
liberal gun access, and self-defense laws—in particular, the
controversial Stand Your Ground laws, which originated in Florida, in
2005, and are now on the books in more than twenty states. Speaking at
the N.A.A.C.P. convention in Orlando three days after the verdict,
Attorney General Eric Holder told of his own experience with racial
profiling, and his worries for his fifteen-year-old son. The line that
generated the biggest response, however, was his statement that “we must
stand our ground to insure that our laws reduce violence, and take a
hard look at laws that contribute to more violence than they prevent.”
Though Holder didn’t mention the N.R.A., his remarks were an implicit
rebuttal to the organization—which has been deeply supportive of Stand
Your Ground laws—and to its flawed reading of the past. Holder was
addressing a group that is intimately familiar with the type of violence
that Colion Noir refers to; some who were present are survivors of it.
This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, but
it has also been fifty years since the N.A.A.C.P. field secretary
Medgar Evers was gunned down outside his home, in Jackson, Mississippi.
Thus a civil-rights organization whose history is marked with violent
assaults on its membership cheered the suggestion that self-defense laws
could be part of the problem.
Read the whole piece
Message edited by inbluevt - Monday, 2013/07/22, 5:20 PM |
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