Racism has been the latest bludgeon many on the left have found to try and bully everyone else to do what they want. If you disagree with them on any number of issues, you’re a racist. The latest issue they’ve been doing that with is guns and the Second Amendment.
Of course, the gun argument and race do have a history together. Namely, that gun control was enacted to keep black men and women disarmed and thus vulnerable to the Klan.
However, CNN wanted to take a look at the role of race and gun politics.
When Americans talk about guns, what’s arguably most interesting isn’t what we say about the devices themselves. It’s what we betray about whose voices — and lives — matter when it comes to our country’s virulent gun culture.
Recall the killing of Philando Castile, a 32-year-old Black man. In July 2016, two police officers pulled him over in a Saint Paul, Minnesota, suburb. When Castile, buckled into his seat, reached for his ID, he informed one of the officers, Jeronimo Yanez, that he had a gun — one that he was legally permitted to carry. Presumably familiar with the horrors that the police tend to visit on Black Americans, Castile just wanted to ward off any trouble. But Yanez lost control, hitting Castile with five of the seven shots he fired. Castile died later that night.
Instead of hurrying to condemn the shooting, as it had done when police officers killed White gun owners, the National Rifle Association initially sought refuge in saying nothing.
Or–and just hear me out here–the NRA wanted to see if the narrative being fed to the public was actually what happened. I mean, I was initially silent for precisely that reason, as were a lot of people.
See, we have heard an awful lot of examples of these supposedly innocent people being killed in what looked like racially motivated attacks, only to find out that Trayvon Martin was bashing a guy’s head into a concrete sidewalk or that Michael Brown charged an officer and was trying to take his weapon.
Was Philando Castile a case like that?
It turned out he wasn’t. Yet if you want to blame anyone for the slow response, blame the media who continued to cry wolf long enough that a lot of us weren’t really ready to take the case at face value.
Moving on…
As Emory University African American studies professor Carol Anderson writes in her new book, “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America,” “The NRA broke its silence only after inordinate pressure from African American members led the gun manufacturers’ lobby to issue a tepid statement that the Second Amendment was applicable ‘regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation.’ “
Huh. Something else Anderson gets wrong.
Well, not entirely. Yes, African-American members did raise a lot of pressure, but so did a lot of white members.
See, once it was clear that Castile really was innocent and that the officer really did screw up by the numbers, a lot of people demanded a response, from within the organization and from without. And a lot of people weren’t satisfied with the NRA’s response even after they said something.
And that includes a lot of white gun owners.
The NRA’s perfunctory response to Castile’s death shone a light on the way that race permeates the politics of gun control.
Decades ago, when Congress actually passed an assault weapons ban (one that, notably, was allowed to expire in 2004), the broad concern was around guns in the hands of people of color — Black Americans, specifically. Our modern Congress finds itself paralyzed now that we’re increasingly facing a different dimension of the issue: White people’s guns, and the consequences of their contested rights to have them.
That would be the Democratic-led Congress that passed an assault weapon ban in opposition to those same white people who owned many of those guns?
See, at every level, this “analysis” suggests that the first four letters of the word are due to this whole thing being pulled from their butts.
History is taken, then twisted and manipulated until it has no resemblance to what it was actually like. They then use this to try and twist the truth, to try and paint gun rights advocates as racists and that gun control is somehow the right thing for black America.
Nowhere in this is there even a hint of statistics on how gun control laws disproportionally impact the black community. Funny how that didn’t seem to make their “analysis.”
Then again, expecting CNN to actually look at the issue in an unbiased manner is about like expecting Amy Schumer to be funny.
