Negroes and the Gun: A Winchester “in every Black home”

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From the Volokh Conspiracy via the Washington Post, a great article on the history of arms in America and how a people's ability to claim their rights and liberties goes hand-in-hand with the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

Negroes and the Gun: A Winchester “in every Black home”

Surveying the landscape in the summer of 1892, Ida B. Wells advised, that “the Winchester rifle deserved a place of honor in every Black home.” This was no empty rhetorical jab. She was advancing a considered personal security policy and specifically referencing two recent episodes where armed Blacks saved their neighbors from lynch mobs.
And from the Black settlements of the west comes the report that “the colored men of Oklahoma Territory mean business. They have an exalted ideal of their own rights and liberties and they dare to maintain them. In nearly every cabin visited was a modern Winchester oiled and ready for use.”
 
I don't understand how any black or Jewish person can be okay with being defenseless. The ideas that "it can never happen to us, not in this country" and "we're too civilized for that to happen" are frighteningly naive and ignorant. It has to get worse before it can get better because over time and generational transitions, people grow overconfident and they lose sight of the values and freedoms that their predecessors fought to the death for in order to provide a better, safer future to their grandchildren. I feel like it's a great dishonor to your ancestors to willingly give up what they fought so hard for. Unfortunately this behavioral trend won't change until people are faced with the same battles that had already been won for them in the past. I see the ACA as the first major step in the right direction because it, hopefully, became a rude awakening to the people that have had their policies cancelled, costs raised, and coverages slashed.
 
there are also two additional problems:

1. Making the right conclusions. I think that there is enough info on Holocaust and other genocides, that many remember them fine, just not making the right conclusion that being weak (as a community or a country) leads to being bent over the barrel or lead to gas chambers ... cause it will never happen here, right?

2. Willingness to pick up a weapon or to act. Being pissed off is one thing, but acting on it is another. There has to be enough of momentum from like-minded individuals to make a difference.
 
From the Volokh Conspiracy via the Washington Post, a great article on the history of arms in America and how a people's ability to claim their rights and liberties goes hand-in-hand with the rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

Negroes and the Gun: A Winchester “in every Black home”

Might I add, if you never read Justice Thomas' concurrence in McDonald v. Chicago, it's an amazing historical analysis of how the Second Amendment was meant to apply to the states so that freed blacks could be protected against white aggression.
 
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