A Truly Progressive Solution to
Cops Shooting Black Men
By Kurt Hofmann, December 17th, 2014
JPFO writer contributor, © 2014.
Among "progressives," it's an article of faith that gun rights advocacy and racism are inextricably linked. One writer goes so far as to argue that broad recognition of gun rights in the U.S. causes cops to shoot black men.
John Bingham
No matter that American "gun control" has its roots in a desire to keep African-Americans disarmed and thus powerless, and that the first "gun control" advocacy group in the U.S. was the KKK, and that incorporation of the Second Amendment, via the Fourteenth Amendment, was the work of a courageous black gun rights advocate. We could point out that the drafter of the Fourteenth Amendment, Representative John A. Bingham (R-OH), intended for that amendment to protect the newly freed slaves from disarmament under state and local law, but none of that matters to those whose agenda is served by equating gun rights advocates to racist haters.
We can even point out that African-Americans are leading the charge in the dramatic increase in the public's increasingly pro-gun rights view:
Over the past two years, blacks' views on this measure have changed dramatically. Currently, 54% of blacks say gun ownership does more to protect people than endanger personal safety, nearly double the percentage saying this in December 2012 (29%).
But even that won't dissuade the "gun rights advocacy is racist" crowd.
Now, in fact, we are told that "science" supports the notion that white gun owners are "more likely to be a racist than if you weren't packing heat," never mind that the "study" seems to point far more toward correlation than causation.
H.A.Goodman
So it is a surprise to see H. A. Goodman, a self-identified "liberal," writing for the unabashedly "progressive" Huffington Post, advocate "open carry" by African-Americans as the way to "end racial profiling in America":
Contrary to conventional thinking on both sides of the political divide, more legal guns in the hands of law-abiding black men will defeat racism and end racial profiling in this country.
The main thrust of Goodman's rationale, also outlined a couple of weeks previously, is that open carry (where legal) is an unambiguous declaration of one's law-abiding nature and peaceable intent, because someone with a nefarious purpose would try to avoid the attention brought by a visibly carried firearm.
This seems more than a little overly optimistic. We have seen, after all, white open carry practitioners, presumably not subject to the racism we hear so much about, being harassed, arrested, and occasionally killed by police--and that's without being "SWATted" by malignant Moms or homicidal radio personalities.
H. A. Goodman will never be mistaken for a firebreathing gun rights advocate, by the way, contemptuously dismissing the very idea that an armed citizenry can deter an overreaching government--despite the fact that we have seen it done, and not too long ago.
Still, now he's advocating carrying guns to effect positive social and political change. That would indicate that he acknowledges that armed private citizens can push the government in directions that the unarmed cannot. That, in turn, is what the Second Amendment has always been about.
A former paratrooper, Kurt Hofmann was paralyzed in a car accident in 2002. The helplessness inherent to confinement to a wheelchair prompted him to explore armed self-defense, only to discover that Illinois denies that right, inspiring him to become active in gun rights advocacy. He also writes the St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner column. Kurt Hofmann Archive.
