The Disarming of Black Americaby Richard Poe
While taking in the sights of Moscow, during my student days in 1978, I ran into an elderly couple from New Jersey. "What a wonderful country!" the woman exclaimed. "There's no crime. You can walk the streets after dark without being afraid."
No crime? The irony of her statement was not lost on me. I knew that the Soviets had murdered tens of millions of people (20 million, according to Stephane Courtois's Black Book of Communism; 60 million, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn). Surely this qualified as a "crime" of some sort. But I held my tongue politely.
Arguing would have seemed insensitive. I knew that, back home in New Jersey, elderly people such as they were prime targets for muggers and burglars. Who was I to begrudge them whatever small pleasure they might glean from strolling Red Square unmolested, under the watchful gaze of gray-uniformed militsionyeri?
Yet I wondered how deep their admiration for Brezhnev's police state really went. Did those dreamy looks on their faces mean they actually preferred Soviet dictatorship to our own system? I tried not to think about it.
That chance encounter in Moscow returned to haunt me later, when I stumbled across two disheartening statistics. The first were nationwide poll results showing that 83 percent of African Americans would support a ban on all gun sales, except by special police permit. The second came from a Department of Housing and Urban Development survey of public housing residents, indicating that 68 percent believed that allowing police to conduct random searches for guns, without warrants, would improve safety in their projects.
Like those elderly tourists in Moscow, black Americans are clearly fed up with crime. And who can blame them? Fully 50 percent of all murder victims in the U.S. are black. But, like those short-sighted tourists, many African Americans appear dangerously willing to tolerate police-state tactics, in exchange for safer streets.
An authoritarian crackdown might well succeed in curbing crime. Did not Mussolini get the trains running on time? But African Americans would be naïve to expect our government to continue working in their best interests, once it has stripped them of their liberties.
The Slippery SlopeThe Clinton Administration lured many black civil rights leaders into supporting the anti-gun movement. But some have declined to jump on the bandwagon.
Niger Innis is one (first name pronounced Nigh-jer). Growing up in Harlem, Innis lost two brothers to gun-wielding killers. But these tragedies only deepened his conviction that an armed and vigilant citizenry is the best curb on lawlessness.
"Not every cop can be everywhere at all times," says Innis, who is national spokesman for the New York-based Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). "Decent men and women with families need to be able to defend themselves and their property. It's that simple."
More to the point, Innis sees gun control as a slippery slope toward outright gun confiscation. Loss of Second Amendment rights, he says, would leave both whites and blacks vulnerable to tyranny.
Disarmed and Disenfranchised"Traditionally, when governments want to disenfranchise people, the first thing they do is disarm them," says Innis. "That was the case in Nazi Germany, when the Jews were disarmed. That was the case in the American South, after slavery."
Innis is correct, on both counts. On November 7, 1938, a 17-year-old Jewish refugee named Herschel Grynszpan shot and killed a German diplomat in Paris. The highly publicized shooting gave the Nazis the excuse they needed for a major crackdown.
German newspapers whipped up hysteria over the threat of Jewish terrorism. Then, on November 11, the Nazi government ordered Jews to surrender all firearms, clubs and knives. Without weapons, the Jews were easily herded into concentration camps.
Southern slaveowners also understood the need to keep their victims helpless and unarmed, as gun-law expert Stephen P. Halbrook documents in his book That Every Man Be Armed.
"No slave shall go armed with a gun, or shall keep such weapons," declared an 1854 law of North Carolina. Violators received 39 lashes.
After the Civil War, many white southerners feared that black freedmen would take bloody vengeance on their former masters. Fears of a black uprising were particularly intense in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina, where blacks outnumbered whites.
White southerners responded by creating a race-based caste system – a U.S. version of apartheid. Gun control was crucial to making it work. Southern whites tried to maintain their antebellum monopoly over firearms. Many states barred African Americans from owning guns.
Local police, state militias and Ku Klux Klansmen rode from house to house, demanding that blacks turn in their weapons. Once disarmed, they were helpless against lynch mobs.
"Before these midnight marauders made attacks upon peaceful citizens," Representative Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts informed the U.S. Congress in 1871, "there were many instances in the South where the sheriff of the county had preceded them and taken away the arms of their victims."
On the other hand, freedmen who kept their guns were able to fight back. Representative Butler described an incident in which armed blacks successfully resisted a Klan attack.
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