Guns are white supremacy’s deadliest weapon. We must disarm hate.

I don’t think about my identity all that much, all those little boxes by race, skin color, sexual orientation or national origin are all part of identity politics that distract us from really important issues.

The term ‘person of color’ should be thrown into the garbage heap of history IMO. It was a racist term then and I think it is still now.
Amen.
 
Opinion by Sharon Risher
Jan. 31, 2021 at 7:43 p.m. UTC
The Rev. Sharon Risher is a member of the Everytown Survivor Network, a volunteer with Moms Demand Action and the author of “For Such a Time as This: Hope and Forgiveness after the Charleston Massacre.”

The defining photograph of the attempted insurrection on Jan. 6 was that of a man strolling through the broken halls of our national Capitol, amid the smashed windows and assorted rubble of the failed coup, proudly brandishing a Confederate flag on his shoulder and hoping to overturn an election decided largely by Black voters. It’s an image that tells the story not only of Jan. 6 or of the Trump presidency, but also of all the steps that led to that moment — the whole history of hate in America captured in one frame.
For me, the echoes of that picture reverberated back nearly six years, to the day my mom — Ethel Lee Lance — was shot and killed while praying in Charleston’s Mother Emanuel Church along with eight other Black Americans, including two of my cousins and one of my close childhood friends. In the months leading up to that tragic day, my mom’s killer posed for pictures with the Confederate flag, sometimes even slinging it over his shoulder just like that insurrectionist in the Capitol did.

The similarities between these two days don’t end there: Both days ended in deaths, both attacks were perpetrated (at least in part) by white supremacists chasing a lost cause, and tragically, the perpetrators of both incidents were carrying more than just flags. My mother’s killer was armed with a handgun; the Capitol insurrectionists were armed with enough live ammunition to shoot every member of the House and Senate five times.
This deadly connection between white supremacy and guns runs throughout our history. In 1866, armed Confederate loyalists stormed the Louisiana Constitutional Convention, murdering 34 Black Americans in an attempt to block suffrage for freed slaves. In 1898, an armed White mob in Wilmington, N.C., proclaimed a “White Declaration of Independence,” then killed at least 60 residents before replacing the multiracial local government with white supremacists. In 1921, mobs of armed White residents of Tulsa attacked the Black neighborhood of Greenwood, murdering as many as 300 Tulsans for the crime of being Black and successful. In 1955, Emmett Till was tortured and shot in the head by White vigilantes. And today, mass shootings – from the church in Charleston to the supermarket in El Paso to the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis. — have been committed by white supremacists filled with hate and armed with a gun.
Simply put, if the Confederate flag is the primary symbol of white-supremacist hate, the gun is its deadliest weapon.

This person is nothing but a racist
 
Risher. Possibly Jewish? Maybe she should consider what her forebearers could have done to resist Nazi oppression with some schmeissers and lugers.
I'm 1/2 Jewish, and I'm ashamed of the American Jews who are largely liberal, and totally forget about what happened 70 years ago. Fuquing idiots!
 
I don’t think about my identity all that much, all those little boxes by race, skin color, sexual orientation or national origin are all part of identity politics that distract us from really important issues.

The term ‘person of color’ should be thrown into the garbage heap of history IMO. It was a racist term then and I think it is still now.

View: https://youtu.be/CXDUdOqAk0Q
 
(Anyone else remember the days when Natick Mall or something
had not yet eaten the bakery?)
Sorry off topic, for 3 hours this morning you had me racking my brain trying to remember where that bread factory was located. I remember that bread smell and following my mother around that store in those little push carts begging her to get twinkies or something. Was this adjacent to the original Sears location?

a09066cc752125351937d717c91f41f8.jpg
 
A man's freedom rests in 3 boxes: the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box.

- Frederick Douglass

Gun ownership was never a part of white supremacy; gun control was always at its heart. The South was the first part of the US to enact widespread gun control (now widely known as Jim Crow), to expressly limit black participation in the freedoms outlined above. The unequal share of weapons by force of law and the balance of power that it created against blacks was the necessary and widely forgotten foundation of lynching (i.e. it's pretty hard to lynch somebody if he and his buddies are shooting at you).

Sharon Risher doesn't want to talk about the real history of gun ownership and control in this country because the agenda that she's pushing exactly matches that of plantation owners, slave catchers and the Klan.

The worst part is that black people are brain-washed into thinking that black people exercising their rights is the reason that so many black people have been shot by other black people. Colion Noir (he's big in Houston, not sure if he's as popular in the NE, but check him out) gave a phenomenal explanation of this in an interview with Joe Rogan. He pointed out that the massive amount of black violence is mostly a function of how we keep statistics, i.e. by race. Whenever and whereever you cram a ton of poor people without legal economic options into a tiny space and enforce the law in the exactly wrong way (i.e. constantly bust people for nuisance crimes but rarely if ever solve the felonies that people actually want handled), you get massive and sustained violence. Rich black neighborhoods don't have problems with violence. West Virginia has a very high rate of murder, and there are basically no black folks in the entire state. The only reason their murder rate isn't higher is that the population density is much lower than say Austin in Chicago or Flatiron (i.e. it's harder to blast Robert Lee McYokelweed for sellin' your mama bad 'shine if he lives 2 counties over and your 1984 Camaro can't make it over the rough patch in the county road leading over there). I'm embellishing for humor, but the point about proximity and frequency of contact is real.

Guns are merely tools: they cannot be good or evil. But the targeted restriction of rights to limit the power of people to resist you IS evil, whether it's directed at black people or against everyone who isn't part of the political elite.
 
Back
Top Bottom