Peter Trumbore: Observations/Research/Diversions

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Once upon a time …

July 12, 2016 By Pete Trumbore

A demonstrator wearing the insignia of the New Black Panthers Party carries a shotgun during a protest against the shooting death of Alton Sterling , near the headquarters of the Baton Rouge Police Department in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, U.S. July 9, 2016.  REUTERS/Jonathan Bachman
A demonstrator wearing the insignia of the New Black Panthers Party carries a shotgun during a protest near the headquarters of the Baton Rouge Police Department in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, U.S. July 9, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Bachman

 

The NRA was in favor of gun control. No really, you can look it up. Here. And the fiercest advocates of open carry of loaded firearms were the Black Panthers. You can read up on that too.

I was reminded of that history this morning as I read that the chairman of the New Black Panther Party, Hashim Nzinga, told the Reuters news agency that members of his group will carry guns for self-defense when they travel to Cleveland to protest at the Republican National Convention next week:

“If it is an open state to carry, we will exercise our second amendment rights because there are other groups threatening to be there that are threatening to do harm to us. If that state allows us to bear arms, the Panthers and the others who can legally bear arms will bear arms.”

Ohio officials have confirmed that it will be legal for demonstrators to carry firearms outside the convention. And while the Secret Service will not allow attendees to bring their guns inside the convention itself, the killing of five police officers in Dallas last week has understandably intensified worries about what will happen when gun-toting demonstrators and counter demonstrators descend on Cleveland.

According to the New York Times:

Ohio’s open-carry laws mean that those who legally own guns can take them into the 1.7-square-mile area where many of the events and protests connected to the Republican convention will be held next week. Beginning Sunday, protesters are expected to flood into the city, with causes ranging from white supremacy to Palestinian rights.

“Obviously, everybody is on edge after Dallas,” Brian Kazy, a member of the Cleveland City Council and its Safety Committee, said in an interview Sunday evening.

There has been speculation about what it will take for the United States to get serious about gun control. As I pointed out a year ago, not the mass killing of schoolchildren, nor Bible study participants, nor moviegoers, nor Marine recruiting officers made any kind of difference. Add to that ugly toll the victims of ISIS-sympathizing terrorists in San Bernardino and Orlando, as well as the five cops in Dallas.

Still nothing changes.

But if we are turning back the clock to the turmoils and mistakes of the late 1960s, as some have suggested, then maybe it will once again be the sight of armed African Americans demanding their rights that will finally be the catalyst for a return to meaningful national gun control.

After all, it was fear of armed blacks that motivated the Ku Klux Klan to seize guns from freedmen in 1866 and Ronald Reagan and California Republicans to call for sweeping gun control legislation 101 years later.

Wouldn’t it be ironic.

The Oath Keepers have plans for Ferguson

August 18, 2015 By Pete Trumbore

Armed Black Panthers on the steps of the California State Legislature, June 1967.
Armed Black Panthers on the steps of the California State Legislature, June 1967.

 

According to a story at Red Dirt Report, the leader of the St. Louis County, MO. chapter of the Oath Keepers and his squad …

… will test state law with a unique experiment by arming 50 blacks with AR-15 rifles while marching through downtown Ferguson, Mo.

Sam Andrews, head of an Oath Keepers group in St. Louis County, Mo., confirmed the event will occur within the next “couple of weeks” to demonstrate to local enforcement officials the meaning and intent of Missouri’s open carry law.

“It will be an iconic event,” he said, comparing it to the raising of the American flag at Iwo Jima or the Martin Luther King, Jr.-led March on Washington, D.C.

According to Andrews, the group’s plans are motivated by two factors. First, he says the group was told by the St. Louis County police officials, who were otherwise cordial, that the group could not carry long-barreled rifles, like the military-grade weapons the group was armed with, inside Ferguson city limits.  That, Andrews said, is a misinterpretation of Missouri’s open-carry laws.

The second factor, though, is far more interesting and, historically speaking, far more provocative.  According to the website The Root, Black Lives Matter protesters challenged the all-white Oath Keepers about their ability to openly carry arms without fear in the middle of Ferguson’s huge police presence.  So in response, Andrews says his group wants to specifically arm black residents because:

Every person we talked to said if they carried they’d be shot by police. That’s the reason we’re going to hold this event and it will be a legal demonstration.

This is truly significant.  As Adam Winkler argued in his 2011 article in The Atlantic, “The Secret History of Guns,” gun control in the United States was for generations driven by fear of armed African Americans. This is why, for most of their respective histories, both the Ku Klux Klan and the NRA both worked hard to limit civilian access to firearms.

Much of this came to a head in California in 1967 when, as Winkler writes:

THE EIGHTH-GRADE STUDENTS gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols.

The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must …

“… take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.”

Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way.

What followed, less than a year later, was the passage of the Mulford Act, which repealed the California state law which allowed the public carrying of loaded firearms. It was signed into law by Gov. Ronald Reagan, today the patron saint not just of the Republican Party but of the gun rights movement generally.

Into this fraught confluence of gun rights, racism, and fear now tread the Oath Keepers. I’m not sure anyone can predict the outcome.

How about now?

July 16, 2015 By Pete Trumbore

ap-chattanooga_custom-0ca1df30e6e4a83f6d6e2311f86848a2a16e945c-s1300-c85
(Associated Press photo)

 

If you’re inclined to keep score:

  • Sandy Hook Elementary, Newtown, CT, December 14, 2012 — 20 children, six adult staff, all killed.
  • Century Movie Theater, Aurora, CO, July 20, 2012 — 12 dead, 70 wounded.
  • Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, SC, June 17, 2015 — nine killed.
  • Navy Operational Support Center, Chattanooga, TN, July 16, 2015 — four killed.

Not the mass killings of first-graders, nor movie goers, nor worshippers at a Bible study have moved the lawmakers the gun lobby keeps on its payroll  to reconsider our unconscionably irresponsible approach toward gun control.

I don’t expect the killing of four Marines at a recruiting center in Tennessee this morning will change that. Do you?

 

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