Mom Demand Action is having a hard time taking off their little white hoods:

A group of mothers and other advocates says a General Assembly proposal seeking to ease gun regulations in North Carolina raises risks for more gun violence because criminal background checks would be required for fewer handgun sales.

Members of the state chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America visited the Legislative Building on Tuesday. They’re concerned about a provision that passed a House committee last week that repealed a sheriff’s duty to issue pistol permits. The permit process required sheriffs to conduct criminal background checks of applicants.

In the United States, gun control has always been about wealthy white people attempting to disarm minorities that scare them. There are precisely zero known exceptions to this harsh reality.

In post-Reconstruction South, Democrats were terrified by the thought of recently-freed slaves opposing the midnight rides of the Democrat-operated Ku Klux Klan. Here in North Carolina, the groups were virtually one in the same, and conspired together to conduct the only successful coup d’état in American history, the overthrow of the bi-racial government of Wilmington, NC in 1898.

North Carolina’s current handgun permitting system was created in this incredibly toxic environment, because the Democrat/Klan-aligned sheriffs of the day did not want blacks to be able to pull a handgun on them when they donned robes and went to terrorize blacks in their infamous “midnight rides.” After all, where’s the fun in a lynching if Deputy Clarence gets shot?

Thankfully, over time the Klan lost (overt) power in North Carolina politics, but the permitting scheme that requires you to show up in person to obtain a permit from the Sheriff—and to prove you’re of the “right” race—still remains.

The legal fig leaf continuing the permitting process was that it served as a background check, but that has been superseded by the FBI NICS background check system, which offers a far more comprehensive check than local systems.

We’ll charitably conclude that N.C. Sheriffs don’t want to give up the antiquated permitting system because they simply don’t want to give up some of their power.

Why Moms Demand Action’s North Carolina chapter wants to block the repeal of a Jim Crow-era embarrassment is harder to discern.