Article by Alex Parker in RedState
ACLU Discovers Another Racist Realm: the Second Amendment
The past year’s headlines strongly suggest: All roads lead to racism.
Across sectors, it seems, prejudice underpins pretty much everything.
The list of infected areas has grown so large, perhaps indicating what isn’t racist would save time.
In fact, the American Civil Liberties Union has recently brought to light yet another offender: the Second Amendment.
Therefore, also not without sin: the Bill of Rights.
On Sunday morning, the ACLU took to Twitter:
“Racism is foundational to the Second Amendment and its inclusion in the Bill of Rights.”
The linked article asks, “Do Black Americans Have the Right to Bear Arms?”
With 233 mass shootings so far this year, the issue of gun violence in the U.S. is all too familiar. … The vigilantism of widespread gun ownership puts Black Americans in an especially vulnerable position given the brutality and human cost of discriminatory policing. … The gun violence epidemic continues to spark debate about the Second Amendment and who has a right to bear arms.
The group makes quite a claim: “Anti-Blackness” birthed the Right to Bear Arms.
That freedom, allegedly, resides somewhere amid “the justification of militia violence.”
Per the ACLU, “Blackness” has been “frame(d)” as an “inherent threat.”
On top of that, America’s rife with “unequal enforcement of gun laws.”
And if you haven’t noticed, white people are anxious:
[T]he rhetoric of gun rights has been selectively manipulated and utilized to inflame white racial anxiety.
The At Liberty podcast promotes Emory University Professor Carol Anderson, author of The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (read RedState Front-Pager Jennifer Oliver O’Connell’s pertinent piece here).
In the episode, Carol says that after 2016’s tragic shooting death of Philando Castile, she researched whether “African-Americans actually have” constitutional gun rights.
Her efforts turned up “all of these laws” pointing to a “fear of the enslaved” and “fear of retribution.”
“The architecture,” she explains, was meant “to control black people, to strip them of their rights.”
But on the Bluebird, tweeters clapped back:
“No, the first gun control laws were created to prevent slaves from revolting, and to keep freed slaves fearing for their lives. Restricting minorities right to bear arms has been the calling card of American racism, not the other way around.”
–Libertarian Party of Texas“So why did black American gun ownership sky rocket in 2020?”
–Libertarian Party of Tennessee“So there’s a 58% increase in black people in the US buying firearms and the ACLU wants us to believe the gun laws were spawned from racism? Classic racist gun control tactics. Read Negroes and the Gun, Negroes With Guns, and Gunfight.”
–Black gun rights advocate Antonia Okafor Cover
As aforementioned, these days, racism’s recognized regularly:
College Symposium Razes the Anti-Black Racism of ‘Good’ Grammar
Department of Education Fights the White Supremacy of Math
Viral Video Rips the Racist Roots of ‘Fatphobia’
Professor: #BlueLivesMatter Is Racist, so Is Society, and Loving Freckles May Be White Pride
Fish Fry: Social Justice Sizzles With the Woke Renaming of a Racism-Riddled Carp
As for the Second Amendment, is it available to Americans who are black?
It’s apparently on offer to Colion Noir — he’s one of America’s foremost gun advocates:
And the former NRA news commentator knows how to stylishly appoint a nightstand:
Colion loves the Second Amendment so much, he wants it to stay:
And among black Americans, the man’s surely far from alone.
Yet, it’s 2021, and a remarkable many things — we’ll likely continue to be told — are badly bigoted.
If we can’t even agree that the constitutional right to own a firearm is available to skin of every shade, boy, have we got massive work ahead.
As we figure it all out, I’ll leave with you a jewel from Jennifer Oliver O’Connell:
The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass was…vocal about his Second Amendment right, and how it applied to the Black person. Douglass stated, “A man’s rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.”
