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Shooting
Holes in the Race Card Nothing has been more damaging to our
Second Amendment than the acquiescence of gun-owners, as a group, in
accepting patently false, emotionally-charged labels hurled at them by
America's anti-self-defense lobby. For the most part, gun-owners have
responded defensively or sometimes, not at all accepting the rules of
engagement as defined by the firearm prohibitionists, instead of
choosing the battlefield of fact and logic. Today, the most dreaded trump card in
America is a simple 6-letter word "R-A-C-I-S-T".
It has been
hurled reflexively at anyone who does not kneel before today's god of
political correctness. More than any other name, this one has the power
to instantly turn the backbone of some Americans both in and out of
politics into quivering masses of Jello. Typical of the race-card tactics used
against American gun-owners is the rhetoric which appeared in a 1990
Injury Prevention Network Newsletter. The Injury Prevention Network is a
group with a well- recognized rabidly firearm prohibitionist bias. Under
a section entitled "Fear and Racism among Gun Owners", the
newsletter cited ...the veiled racism of NRA literature promoting
self-defense...–, and then made the following claim: The gun lobby grows fat...on a
generalized fear and hostility toward African American
people...especially on the association between African American men and
crime... It is true that large urban, minority
areas are the ones which experience the highest levels of firearm
related violent crime. It is also true that this fact has created a
sense of unwarranted guilt among some gun-owners, that, because of their
espousal of private firearm ownership, THEY are the cause of America's
social ills. But are those who advocate and steadfastly defend private
firearm ownership the true racists in America today? As any informed gunner will tell you,
Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein are rabid firearm prohibitionists.
Because of that, it is THEY, and their ilk, who are the real racists not
law-abiding gun-owning Americans. The reason is simple: the roots of gun
control in America are steeped in racism! The earliest gun control laws
in this country were passed for one reason only: to keep the newly-freed
slaves unarmed and defenseless. STICKS
AND STONES? "Cop killer bullets",
"assault weapons", and the like these are some of the
emotional hot-buttons created by the Schumers and Feinsteins, calculated
to frighten an unknowing public and turn public sentiment against
firearms and their owners. They are designed to replace rational
discussion in the firearm debate with raw, negative emotionalism. But
probably none has a more direct connection to racism as the non-descript
"Saturday-Night-Special", a favorite target of firearm-
prohibitionists. In a 1976 article, Bruce-Briggs provided background on
the origins of the label:
It is
difficult to escape the conclusion that the “Saturday Night Special”
is emphasized [by both sides in the firearm debate] because it is cheap
and is being sold to a particular class of people. The name is
sufficient evidence the reference is to "nigger-town Saturday
night" Twenty years later, America's firearm
prohibitionists like Schumer and Feinstein are still pushing laws
designed to ban the sale and possession of inexpensive handguns, after
having changed the name of their target to one more politically-correct:
"junk guns". The most recent evidence that gun
control policies are inherently racist comes from the extensive research
on gun control in America by Dr. John Lott. Lott is an economist at the University
of Chicago, and co-author of the 1997 Lott/Mustard study on
concealed-carry of firearms in America. According to Lott's new book,
"More Guns, Less Crime", when allowed the means to defend
themselves, "law-abiding minorities in the most crime-prone areas
produced the greatest reductions in crime..." It is large, urban, densely populated
minority areas which benefit the most from concealed-carry laws
ironically the same areas where opposition to such laws by politicians
is greatest. Dr. Lott further pointed out that laws which seek to ban
low-cost firearms i.e. so-called "Saturday-Night-Specials" -
only serve to disarm those very people. So why, when it is restrictive, racist
gun laws which have, in part, spawned the statistics that gun-owners are
accused of generating, do gun-owners continue to accept the epithet of
"racist" hurled at them? For the most part, it is because many
do not know how to effectively respond to such false charges. By letting
those charges slide, they let the Feinsteins and Schumers turn the truth
on its end. GOING
WHERE FEW GUN-OWNERS DARE GO There is, however, one group of
gun-owners with an unbroken habit of bringing up issues others find
uncomfortable to deal with: Jews for the Preservation of Firearm
Ownership (JPFO). In 1992, JPFO's "Gun-Control: Gateway to
Tyranny" documented the fact that America's Gun Control Act of 1968
was patterned after - and paralleled - Nazi law. In 1994, JPFO's
treatise "Lethal Laws" painstakingly documented how some
governments turned criminal in the 20th century, and, after disarming
their civilian populations, murdered almost 60 million of their own
citizens. It is no great surprise that many of
JPFO's findings have been difficult for many Americans to accept. Most
of us grew up believing America to be the quintessential "land of
the free". To think that OUR government would adopt laws based on
the antithesis of that paradigm is simply unthinkable. But coming to grips with reality is a
fundamental prerequisite to holding onto liberty. And the truth of the
matter is that there are well over 20,000 racist gun control laws on the
books in America, today. Now JPFO has given gun-owners a new way to
fight back. This one is the fourth in their "Gran'pa Jack"
series of teaching tools designed to destroy gun control. Their latest
addition is called "Gun-Control is RACIST!: Facts that Racists
Don't Want You to Know". "Gran'pa Jack" is deceptively
light-hearted (written as an easy-to-read comic book), but its message
most definitely is not. It's a deadly serious effort designed to inform
Americans of the racist history of gun control and that gun control
doesn't save lives it only creates victims. Here are a few of the facts
exposed by Gran'pa Jack: · Cheap firearms
(Saturday-Night-Specials) were first banned just after the Civil War, to
make sure that former slaves could not get weapons for self-defense.
California and other states have persistently pushed for more such laws.
· After the Civil War, states like
Alabama and Texas placed huge taxes on guns. Since most blacks were
poor, they couldn't afford to pay the tax and buy a gun. More than 100
years later, Sen. Patrick Moynihan [D-NY] is still pushing for a law
that would raise taxes on the most popular self-defense ammunition by
1,000%! · For decades, "gun control"
helped keep black people defenseless against lynching. Between 1882 and
1968, 3,446 blacks were murdered in the U.S. by lynching. · In 1941, Florida Supreme Court
Justice Buford admitted that Florida's gun control laws were passed for
the purpose of disarming Negro laborers, and were never intended to be
applied to the white population. JPFO's latest addition to its Gran'pa
Jack series provides gun-owners with potent ammunition for calling the
bluff of America's firearm- prohibitionists, by using their own favorite
trump card effectively against them. The booklets come with a
do-it-yourself public relations kit, designed to give individual
activists the tools to confront and expose the real racists in America.
Gun-owners can no longer afford to be passive if they wish to preserve
the Second Amendment for future generations. Simply telling our elected
officials "No new gun laws!" doesn't work. It's time to use
their own race-card against them. It's time to let the word
"racist" hit the fan...and end up on the faces of those who
really are. REFERENCES Briggs-Briggs, B.; "The Great
American Gun War"; The Public Interest; No. 45 Fall 1976; 37-62 Eisen, A.; "Guns: In Whose Hands?
A Portrait of Gun Owners and Their Culture"; Injury Prevention
Network Newsletter; Winter 1989-90; 9-10 Lott, Jr., J.R. and Mustard, D.B.;
"Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns";
Journal of Legal Studies; Vol 26(1); 1-68; University of Chicago,
January 1997 Lott, Jr., J.R.; More Guns, Less Crime:
Understanding Crime and Gun-Control Laws; University of Chicago Press;
Chicago, IL 60637; 1998 Simkin, J., Zelman, A., Rice, A.;
Lethal Laws; JPFO Press; Hartford, 1994 Simkin, J., Zelman, A.;
"Gun-Control": Gateway to Tyranny; JPFO Press; Hartford, 1992 Zelman, A., Stevens, R.; "Gran'pa
Jack Exposes...”Gun Control” is Racist!"; JPFO Press; Hartford,
1998
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