Channeling Dr. King

As it is always with great men, there are many who want to imagine that they would have supported this or that, or surmise what they may have thought of our modern situation.  The Brady Campaign are no exception on the anniversary of his assassination:

If Dr. King is looking down on us today, I can imagine him seeing 12,352 gun murders a year in the United States – nearly 34 every day – and telling us that “the old eye-for-an-eye philosophy leaves everyone blind.”

Somebody’s got to “have some sense” in America.

Maybe he would, and maybe he wouldn’t.  One thing we do know is that the 14th Amendment of the US constitution was passed partly to prevent southern states from passing and enforcing laws to disarm blacks, so that the Klan wouldn’t risk armed resistance when they terrorized them.

Let’s not also forget the Deacons for Defense:

In some cases, the Deacons had a relationship with other civil rights groups that advocated and practiced non-violence: the willingness of the Deacons to provide low-key armed guards facilitated the ability of groups such as the NAACP and CORE to stay, at least formally, within their own parameters of non-violence.^[2] Nonetheless, their willingness to respond to violence with violence, led to tension between the Deacons and the nonviolent civil rights workers whom they sought to protect.

Roy Innis has said of the Deacons that they “forced the Klan to re-evaluate their actions and often change their undergarments”, according to Ken Blackwell.^[3]

Let’s not forget Condi Rice’s support of the second amendment.  She has been quoted:

During the bombings of the summer of 1963, her father and other neighborhood men guarded the streets at night to keep white vigilantes at bay. Rice said her staunch defense of gun rights comes from those days. She has argued that if the guns her father and neighbors carried had been registered, they could have been confiscated by the authorities, leaving the black community defenseless.

Finally, it’s known that Dr. King also owned firearms, and even applied (and was denied) a gun permit in the days before his movement determined that a non-violence posture was the best tactic for the civil rights movement.

The untold story of the civil rights movement is that it involved a lot of blacks and civil rights workers protecting themselves with firearms.  The untold story of the gun control movement was that it originally started in order to disarm blacks.

The Brady Campaign does the civil rights movement injustice by wanting to imagine acceptance of their agenda in a speech where Dr. King was calling on followers not to seek violent retribution for wrongs done to them, not speaking against people defending themselves. Dr. King understood, correctly, that America could be persuaded to change by letting the segregationists be the provocateurs, the arsonists, the terrorists, and the assassins.  It was the smart tactic.  It was the correct tactic.

What Dr. King would think of gun control today, I don’t know, and neither does the Brady Campaign, but ignoring the racist and xenophobic history of gun control does society no service.  I do not believe the Brady Campaign pushes gun control because of any racist agenda; that motivation to pass gun laws is something that fortunately is now only in our past, but it ought not be ignored in the ongoing debate over our nation’s relationship with firearms.