The Secret History of Guns

[Knuckle Dragger]

This article in the current issue of The Atlantic should be considered required reading. If Comm2A had a reading list this would be on it. Adam Winkler is not generally considered to be sympathetic to guns rights, but gives us a very candid and succinct history of gun control in the US. The link between race and gun control is compelling and from a 21st century perspective the relationship between politics and 2nd amendment civil rights is counter intuitive. I've always argued that gun rights is divorced from politic ideologies and this history only supports my view.

The Fourteenth Amendment illustrates a common dynamic in America’s gun culture: extremism stirs a strong reaction. The aggressive Southern effort to disarm the freedmen prompted a constitutional amendment to better protect their rights. A hundred years later, the Black Panthers’ brazen insistence on the right to bear arms led whites, including conservative Republicans, to support new gun control. Then the pendulum swung back. The gun-control laws of the late 1960s, designed to restrict the use of guns by urban black leftist radicals, fueled the rise of the present-day gun-rights movement—one that, in an ironic reversal, is predominantly white, rural, and politically conservative.

A sign of the NRA’s new determination to influence electoral politics was the 1980 decision to endorse, for the first time in the organization’s 100 years, a presidential candidate. Their chosen candidate was none other than Ronald Reagan, who more than a decade earlier had endorsed Don Mulford’s law to disarm the Black Panthers—a law that had helped give Reagan’s California one of the strictest gun-control regimes in the nation.

 

[mark056]

Wow...and in the Atlantic yet. I wonder what zbrod would think of an NES Forum member who reads the Atlantic ? I am bit surprised that it would publish an article like this.

Thank you for sharing.

 

[Buck Nekid]

Knuckledragger, thank you for this excellent link! This is the most succinct thing I have ever read about the history of U.S. gun control. Good find!

 

[mark056]

Knuckledragger this is a duplicate thread, I just found out. Great info, though.