*I prefer Team Red and Team Blue because the current political climate has become eerily reminiscent of sports fandom, akin to the rivalry between the Yankees and the Red Sox at its worst. It’s not enough that your team wins a game – even if it’s not against that team – you also check the standings to make sure the other team lost. That’s where we are in this country on politics.
I was talking to someone over a beer a while back and they said, after reading some Facebook post of mine, “You’re so into politics, hunh?” which caught me off-guard.
“Not at all,” I said. “I hate politics.” I took a sip of my beer. I could see my friends face wrinkle in disbelief. “I don’t believe in politics; I believe in principles.”
For me, politics is a dirty word. It implies belief in an issue not because of its merits, but instead because of where it falls on the political spectrum. Given that we have a two-party system, it implies choosing sides of an issue based upon Team affiliation, and reduces complex issues to nothing more than soundbites meted out by ill-informed Congress-critters through a compliant media. I find politics utterly distasteful largely because of politicians. It self-selects for those who want to wield power over their fellow Americans, all because they think they’re smarter.
I’ve been to Capitol Hill on several occasions, including having clients testifying before Congressional committees. I’m here to tell everyone – these people are not very smart. It would shock most Americans to learn how much of what gets done is decided by undergraduates and other staffers and interns, who generally have not clue one about most of the issues that get pushed their way. I wish I were making any of that up.
The gun debate provides a wonderful window into just how unprincipled both sides are. History, surrounding the gun debate in this case, but just generally on any issue, provides unequivocal proof of just how venal and flat-out evil politicians can be. I’ve fairly well-covered Team Blue, but for a moment it’s worth looking at Team Red, who are now generally regarded as being pro-gun rights.
In May of 1967, the Black Panthers, led by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, marched on the CA legislature in Sacramento, right up the steps of the building, armed to the teeth. They walked inside the building – because there were no metal detectors back then; we didn’t yet live in a police state like we do now – carrying loaded pistols, shotguns, and automatic weapons.
The protest, which was completely peaceful, was in response to CA Governor Ronald Reagan – yes, that one – signing the Mulford Act into law. The Mulford Act prohibited open carry of guns and the Black Panthers – and others involved in the civil rights movement – saw it as an attempt to disarm blacks and their allies. As Reason magazine pointed out, Don Mulford, a Republican representative from Oakland, was supported by the NRA in the legislation. Today, of course, many Republicans and the NRA “[support] open carry…unequivocally.”
A piece in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Secret History of gun Control” points out that “[c]ivil-rights activists, even those committed to nonviolent resistance, had long appreciated the value of guns for self-protection. Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a permit to carry a concealed firearm in 1956, after his house was bombed. His application was denied, but from then on, armed supporters guarded his home.”
Glenn Smiley, one of King’s advisers, described the King home as “an arsenal.”
It is thus not entirely inaccurate to call gun control measures racist in their origins- even if we go back as far as the Civil War. In the book “Guns in American Society,” Gregg Lee Carter points out the case of United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876), the first time the Supreme Court had ever heard a case involving the Second Amendment. The facts are sufficiently telling on the subject of gun control that they need recitation.
After a disputed election in Louisiana, blacks were standing guard along with their white Republican allies on the steps of the local courthouse. A different group of armed whites, led by William Cruikshank, came and attacked the black defenders and their allies. Some blacks were killed and others stripped of their weapons after the firefight. Eventually, the white attackers were charged and convicted under the Enforcement Act, a Louisiana statute. The Supreme Court overturned their convictions, finding that the 2nd Amendment did not apply to the states (that would not become the law of the land until 1925 with Gitlow v. New York) and that the statute was too vague to be enforceable.
It is hardly hyperbole to point out that the history of gun control in the United States is racist in its origins. The irony, of course, that Team Blue now wholeheartedly supports gun control (and truthfully, when the mask slips, it’s clear what Team Blue wants is complete confiscation, as an Op Ed in the Washington Post recently offered.)
Frederick Douglass was an advocate of gun rights for blacks, among many others.
I have no problem with Republicans who are for gun regulation getting saddled with that history and having it rammed down their throats. They, who are supposed to be the party of smaller government and American Exceptionalism, are the bigger hypocrites. In fact, in a related story, Don Baum, a reporter for the Washington post, wrote an amazing book about the origins of the War on Drugs. It started under Nixon. The entirety of the War on Drugs was cooked up to find an excuse to arrest blacks and the anti-war left, who were protesting in the streets at the time, both for civil rights and against the Vietnam War.
[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to. — H. R. Haldeman to his diary
Dan Baum’s “Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure.” If this isn’t explicit enough, Baum interviewed John Ehrlichmann, Nixon’s White House Counsel, after Ehrlichmann got out of jail as a result of his part in the Watergate break-in. Here’s what Baum told a radio show host, Peter Werbe, in an interview.
I interviewed John Erlichman [a Nixon White House aide] who said, “We knew drugs were not the health problem we were making it out to be, but there were political benefits to be gained.”
Every administration since then has known drugs are not a statistically significant threat to the nation’s health. But they’ve all understood the political advantage of a war on drugs.
http://goodfelloweb.com/werbe/wondrugs.htm
The “political advantage” by Nixon (a Republican) was that it allowed him to create federal crimes, and involve the feds in law enforcement in a way that they never had been. Drugs, or any kind of criminal activity, had always been a matter of local law enforcement. But Nixon’s White House and conservatives needed a weapon against their political enemies. The War on Drugs was it. Drugs were generally associated with the political left and blacks, the two groups that were making Nixon’s life hell.
Given the timing of all of these incidents: the Mulford Act in 1967, the follow-on War on Drugs in 1969, and Reagan’s continued support for gun control legislation (including the Brady Act) when he was President, I find Team Red to be as hypocritical, immoral, unethical, and downright shitty as I do Team Blue. Team Blue, however, started out as the party of racists, so it’s hard to find them hypocritical for wanting to keep blacks disarmed – that’s been their take all along. The current crop of Team Red gun rights supporters, however, seem completely unaware of their own party’s complicity in pushing forward gun control legislation – heartily! – in support of a racist policy, whose origins were much as Second Amendment rights advocates have always foretold.
I don’t want to keep belaboring the Second Amendment arguments. In truth, I was never really a big gun rights advocate until about 2.5 years ago when, after finally leaving the military, I decided to take up CrossFit, Inc. on the offer of choosing from among a number of gifts. One of them was a Smith and Wesson .357 revolver. It was delivered to my local gun store a month or so after my 43rd birthday. Because of the “common sense” gun control legislation that is prevalent in virtually every state, particularly in the Peaceful People’s Republic of Massachusetts, it took me almost a year to get that gun. And I was fortunate that because I still had short hair and my military ID that they let me shortcut some of the requirements, especially after I went to a gun range to demonstrate my proficiency and vastly outshot my instructor with his pistol – (and I’m not some kind of ninja with a pistol). The “may issue” laws put unreviewable discretion in the hands of some local fat fuck sheriff behind a desk who (in my town) decided that ONLY retired cops and active duty military could get a concealed carry permit.
For all of the bullshit about what the Second Amendment means, I finally found someone who put together a wonderful historical timeline, referencing contemporary writings, to explain exactly why the American revolution wasn’t simply about the tax on tea. That’s the most recent rejoinder I heard when I pointed out that the “British were coming” to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock and also to capture the weapons stored at Lexington and Concord.
This bit of history is a must read for any American who truly wants to be informed on the subject. It is written by a Constitutional Law professor, so I can include my appeal to authority for all of the pseudo-intellectuals, although unfortunately I know that those who want to take guns fundamentally don’t give a shit about facts, reason, history, or anything that would suggest that seizing guns is ethically wrong, morally wrong (there’s a difference), and just plain evil.
As a final pragmatic matter, one thing bears telling the gun-grabbers: this isn’t a fight you can ever win. Ever. Who are you going to get to come confiscate the guns of gun-owners? Your guys with guns, i.e. law enforcement? While I hate police unions, I should note that this has been tried in Connecticut and the police union simply refused to carry out the governor’s wishes. If the news source doesn’t seem credible, I was a firsthand witness to it. I know a LOT of Connecticut cops, given that I was a plank owner in CrossFit Thin Blue Line (yep, that’s its name) and I was also a guest at the CT municipal police academy to introduce CrossFit there. I have deep roots in the CT LEO community and I was asked about this repeatedly by people in those organizations.
As someone pointed out to me, the set of people who own lots of guns includes a ton of LEOs. What – are they going to go start arresting each other?? This is what gun-grabbers just don’t understand – and that’s because people who are anti-gun are fundamentally non-gun owners – you can’t expect the people who own guns, including the cops, to just give them to you, the ignorant nincompoops who don’t understand the need for guns, nor their utility. Those of us who have used them to save lives understand that bad people have them and will use them on others and we have no intention of being the victims of someone else who has a gun.
Most importantly, I return to a fundamental philosophical, moral, and ethical principle: if you believe there is some crisis that needs government intervention, if that intervention includes depriving someone else, some other American citizen of their liberty or freedom, then you should do the following:
1 – Go get the keys to your car;
2 – Go outside and unlock the doors of your car;
3 – Open the driver’s side door;
4 – Now slam your hand in that door until the urge to take away someone else’s rights goes away, you stupid, fascist fuck.
There is no solution to any problem that should ever even be entertained that includes the deprivations of someone else’s liberty in any form. That is not any kind of solution at all. The entire point of the founding of this republic was, as Lincoln put it just “four score and seven years” after its birth, that we were “a new nation, conceived in Liberty…”