Miguel posted a screen shot but I wanted to dig into the article.
Column: Is California ready for more Black people to legally carry guns in public?
Nathan W. Jones leads the Bay Area chapter of the Black Gun Owners Assn. But until a few years ago, he wasn’t even into guns.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. And George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, sending racial justice protesters into the streets. And white supremacists trashed the U.S. Capitol in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
“I had visions of mobs dragging people through the streets, and something just kind of switched,” Jones told me. “We can’t rely on anybody else to come and save us. It has to be us.”
On the one hand, he wants it to be easy for law-abiding citizens to be able to defend themselves “if and when the time arises.” But on the other hand, he’s a 50-year-old realist who knows that fear and hatred of Black people run deep in the United States, especially when we’re armed.
“There’s no overt racism when we go to the gun range, but we know how people are looking at us,” Jones said of the dozens of Black members who meet up to go shooting. “We know the things that people think.”
This is interesting. They interviewed a black gun owners in California who assumes everyone around him watching him shoot is a racist. Being from California, most of the people he is surrounded by are Liberals. Given how the LA Times introduced him, it’s highly likely that he is on the political Left himself, and therefore sees race and racism in everything.
Whatever bigotry at the range he’s experienced, I haven’t seen in Alabama. Nor have I seen it in the gun community that subscribes to high profile gun rights advocate Colion Noir and cheers on the increase in minority gun ownership.
California Democrats are scrambling to craft and enact new legislation this week that would somehow salvage the requirement — assuming local law enforcement continues to enforce it — that residents get a permit before carrying a concealed weapon.
But the governor and lawmakers could fail, and the Supreme Court’s ruling could stand. And then, California could be forced to confront a reality that has long made many self-proclaimed liberals uncomfortable: Black people — potentially a lot of us — legally carrying guns in public.
This is an amazing admission. That tolerant Liberals/Progressives are uncomfortable with black people owning guns. They are the bigots they call everyone else.
Lest you think I’m being facetious, recall how California got started on its journey to having the toughest gun control laws in the country.
It was in 1967 that members of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense staged a protest at the California Capitol. Armed with the handguns and shotguns they normally used to protect Black neighborhoods in Oakland by “policing the police,” they announced that the time had come for “Black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.” And then they went inside.
Lawmakers were so freaked out that they quickly passed the very bill the Black Panthers had been protesting — the Mulford Act, which banned the open carry of loaded weapons without a permit. Gov. Ronald Reagan signed it posthaste.
Over the next few years, the Mulford Act, which the National Rifle Assn. supported, inspired a slew of gun control laws in other states and Congress.
Of course, these days, the NRA is very much against gun control, although its stance on Black people doesn’t seem to have changed very much.
Yes, we know about the Mulford Act. We know how the NRA has shifted over time. It it, however, a slander without evidence to say that the NRA was and is bigoted against black people.
Considering their aforementioned admission of Liberal bigotry, this is just projection.
Still, over the last few years as Americans have stocked up on guns at record rates, it is Black people — especially women — who have been buying them the most. Between 2019 and 2020 alone, there was a 58% spike, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation.
The defund the police movement and soft on crime policies of the Left have caused massive crime spikes in black communities. They want to protect themselves.
That meme that has been floating around social media for a few weeks — the one that half-jokingly suggests that Republican politicians could be prompted to support gun control if more Black people were to start packing heat?
The Left can’t meme.
Justice Clarence Thomas, in his opinion for the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Bruen case, waxed philosophical about how the right to bear arms was crucial for the self-protection of Black people in the South during Reconstruction.
And how in 1868, Congress “reaffirmed that freedmen were entitled to the ‘full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty [and] personal security … including the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.’”
Meanwhile, a coalition of progressive organizations, including the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, the Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defender Services, filed an amicus brief in the case, urging the court to rule exactly as it did.
Ummm…. yes. Much of the history of gun control was “how do we keep those undesirables from being armed.”
In the South, that was mostly freed blacks.
In New York, it was blacks and immigrants. Rich people could always afford the licenses.
A business owner in Oakland, his gun club — like Choice’s club — is full of Black professionals. Doctors, even cops. Law-abiding citizens with wives and husbands and children, and deep ties to their communities.
“Still, we know that all eyes are on us,” Jones said. “And so we also know that we cannot be the group that has an accidental discharge. We cannot be the group that is handling our firearms in an unsafe manner. We have to be more in control and knowing what we’re doing more than anybody else, because all eyes are on us waiting for us to make a mistake.”
Welcome to the world of legal concealed carry. Every responsible CCW owner feels this way regardless of race because if we screw up we will be the case study the Left uses to take down concealed carry.
Talk to white guys with permits. You’ll be surprised just how common our footing is on this.
Jones sees it as part of the mission of the Black Gun Owners Assn. to challenge preconceived notions many Americans have about who should and should not be able to carry a gun. But he laments that this is the reality, even in liberal California.
Liberal Californians are a bunch of bigots. Take a CCW class in Miami.
If the Supreme Court’s ruling sticks, Jones believes, more Black people could start carrying their weapons in public — particularly if the white supremacists and Christian nationalists in our midst start doing the same.
Good to know the LA Times assumes the millions of us CCW holders are Christian nationalist white supremacists.
Jones feels he has little choice but to be a gun owner, though.
“What we need to do,” he said, “is redefine the notion of Black people with guns and what that means.”
Again, this is the perspective of someone from California.
I think the perspective of a black or other minority gun owner from Florida or Texas would be different.
The takeaway here is the California Liberals are horrendous bigots. For all they preach about tolerance, in the end they are no different that Southern Democrats from the 1860s. They cannot stand the idea of black people having guns.
They deal with this cognitive dissonance by projecting their bigotry onto the Right.
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