Anyone with a marginal education in the history of US law, will recognize that many of the gun control laws enacted since the civil war (and before) have been direct, overt efforts to keep people of color disarmed. The “Slave Codes” of the pre-war south and the fact that Native Americans weren’t covered by the Bill of Rights until 1924 are only the most overt, and perhaps easier to look at through this lens because of their seeming remoteness from today. But from Jim Crowe laws after the Civil War, to the California Mulford Act banning Open Carry in the 1960s, there are numerous more modern examples, and the evidence points to an obvious conclusion: Gun control is racist, and always has been.
The Anti-gun lobby, and the largely Democrat legislators who follow it have mostly avoided this issue, likely suspecting how poorly linking your cause to centuries of the suppression of natural rights of people based on race goes over with their constituents. Side-stepping the racism inherent in gun control seems to have gone out of vogue though, and with impressive speed.
Instead of ignoring the racist roots and remnants in these laws, they seem to have embraced them, with NY and CA both referencing them as justification for current attempts at skirting Bruen and other recent right-affirming SCOTUS decisions. Somehow this hasn’t struck them as a negative, and in their desperation, they’d started saying the quiet part out loud.
Hopefully this does two things:
- Wakes up the electorate to the reality of putting heavy restrictions and paywalls on enumerated rights
- Turns some of their supporters against them, because of the incongruity of touting yourself as “The Resistance” while oppressing minorities.
Of course cognitive dissonance is the national pastime these days, so the impact may be small, but it’s good to see the anti-rights crowd is running out of untainted arguments, and currently tearing out the kitchen sink, prepping to throw it too.
