Over the past few weeks, I have had new arguments with people close to me over gun control. When you argue with a person about gun control, it has little to do with facts.

I am used to it by now after twenty years of activism, but it still gets under my skin sometimes.

For generations, it was been illegal for a person of color to own or carry a firearm. Institutionalized slavery served to imprint both the fear of armed black retaliation on whites, and a fear of legal firearms ownership on newly-freed slaves that wanted to conform and not be seen as a threat.

“Can’t we all just get along?”

It is akin to a societal “Stockholm syndrome,” a psychological phenomenon when a hostage defends his or her oppressor. Minorities in America has been culturally conditioned to defend gun control in hopes that it will stop crime, or save lives. This culture parrots the terms, “black on black crime,” “gun violence,” and “assault weapons,” without understanding the facts or grasping that the roots of gun control are racist in nature.

Guns have little to do with “black on black crime,” other than they are one of the tools used to defend the drug trade used illegally in gang warfare. Black-on-black crime statistics don’t tell the whole story. If it were possible to remove guns from these criminal enterprises, we would have done so, but criminals don’t obey gun laws, and guns are only a small part of the problem.

Addictions, a lack of parenting, and hopelessness are deeper causes of the crime that occur in the inner cities where gun laws are the strictest already.

Some like to imply that a person of color which supports the Second Amendment like I do is an “Uncle Tom,” not understanding that they in fact are the ones that are siding with the creators of the Black Codes, and doing what the Klan couldn’t do. “Uncle Tom” is probably the most derogatory term in black culture. It refers to a black person who is eager to win the approval of white people and willing to cooperate with them against their own best interests.

Race is still used to separate Americans today. I hate that. The truth is, anybody that will hand you a gun is likely a friend, and anyone trying to take one away the right to own one your enemy.

Only free men own guns, slaves cannot.

The term “gun violence” is another misnomer that is spoken without much thought.

There is no such thing as gun violence. There is just violence.

If the term gun violence was correct, then gun ownership always equates to murder. It does not. It would mean that the shotguns owned by my grandmother and uncles killed people when they weren’t using them.

It would mean that guns have a mind of their own.

The latest argument is over so-called “assault weapons.” It is brought up during every media broadcast, no matter how someone lost his or her life. For the percentage of Americans that only own firearms for hunting, the “assault weapon” or “high-capacity” argument is used against them. Typically hunters don’t use modern arms to hunt, with so they feel like the high-capacity magazine argument is relevant.

These arguments are used by our elders, who don’t know that magazine capacity is not linked to reducing the vast majority of homicides, or to stopping mass shootings. To many of them, an AR-15 is a military-style assault weapon with no hunting purpose. They don’t realize that all the arms they use today are former “military-style” weapons of the past. Even muzzleloaders were military-style arms 200 years ago. They don’t see the connection with hunting ammunition and military calibers. They are oblivious to the cosmetic differences and similarities. And because of that, they are used and quoted by politicians to take the rights away from their grandchildren.

I am happy to share the fact that every person of color is not anti-gun, and that the few people that you do see go through a lot of struggle to exercise our rights… even within our own communities.

We shall overcome, one day…