Month: October 2011

Ladd Everitt speaks about his confrontation with Professor Adam Winkler on his own blog. I think you can surmise from Everitt’s tone that the one aspect of Winkler’s book that really gets his goat is that it lent us credibility on an argument that Everitt finds abhorrent, which is that some gun control laws, even some still on the books today, originated for racist or xenophobic reasons. He runs around in circles trying to come to terms with Winkler’s book, rather unsuccessfully, when he sort of awkwardly stumbles into what I think  is probably the meat of his argument:

It is therefore confusing that Winkler would assert, “I do think that gun laws historically have been tied to race and racism and we should take that seriously when we’re thinking about a gun control law today.”  Why?  If African-Americans have moved beyond the past and strongly support contemporary gun control proposals (which even Winkler acknowledges are not motivated by race), why should it be an issue?

Except the latest polling shows that support for gun control even among the black community has been slipping, and now stands at about 30% of blacks believing that supporting gun rights is more important than supporting controls (in contrast to 53% of whites). Everitt misses the point of enumerating rights, which is to put them outside the scope of the political process, and leave them retained where they belong and from whom they originate; the people. 65% of the population simply can’t get together and vote away the rights of the other 30%. So when some Americans have greater access to their rights than other Americans, this concerns me, regardless of whether or not a majority of people having their rights trampled on support it or not.

But Everitt actually misses the main reason why I think exposing the racist and xenophobic history of many of our guns laws is important — because we’re still living under many of them. The history of the Sullivan Act has been well documented, and is still active law in New York. A source in the previously linked law review article cites that it was meant to:

strike hardest at the foreign-born element . . . . As early as 1903 the authorities had begun to cancel pistol permits in the Italian sections of the city. This was followed by a state law of 1905 which made it illegal for aliens to possess firearms ‘in any public place’. This provision was retained in the Sullivan law.

It’s very important to discredit these laws as being abhorrent, and outside our tradition when it comes to how we treat constitutional rights. If the motivation for many gun control laws was disarming disfavored groups, rather than a heart-felt desire to improve public safety and lower crime, the courts may be more inclined to look skeptically on them. Indeed, as we have noticed with the latest Heller II case, where the Sullivan Act was cited, shows the importance of discrediting it and other laws on the books which share its history.

And that, folks, is probably what really has Everitt up in arms; our idea that many of these laws have racist origins is getting mainstream acceptance from the legal establishment. If Ladd is an astute observer, he will notice that this happened previously with the notion that the Second Amendment is an individual right rather than a collective right, and he is well aware how that ended for his cause. So here we go again, with another idea he finds abhorrent, gaining mainstream acceptance. Let us hope this ends the same way for him.

UPDATE: For the curious, the picture featured in this post is that of Big Tim Sullivan himself.