Modern negros

I know exactly what it feels like to be a negro. At least I do when it comes to gun control.

In 1840, the North Carolina supreme court passed a statute decreeing: “That if any free negro, mulatto, or free person of colour, shall wear or carry about his or her person, or keep in his or her house, any shot gun, musket, rifle, pistol, sword, dagger or bowie-knife … he or she shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and may be indicted therefore.” This law did not apply to whites - only black or mixed-race people.

In the 1890s, Florida also passed race-specific gun control laws. In 1941, Justice Burford, a judge in the supreme court in Florida, overturned a conviction for carrying a handgun without a permit on the basis that the state’s original gun control statutes had a racial basis. “I know something of the history of this legislation”, he said. “The act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro labourers … and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied.”

All gun laws passed in the United States since my birth in 1971 have been designed not for the purposes of solving a problem. Rather, they have been designed for the purposes of making people feel better about a problem. The problem is that sometimes, bad people get access to guns.

Guns are not moral. They are neither good or bad. They are tools in the hands of people who are either good or bad. Because our society has increasingly evolved into a reactionary, status oriented, instant gratification driven one, we frame the war against individualism poorly. We tell ourselves that only government should have guns because only government is responsible enough to use them wisely.

By arguing thusly, and by passing increasingly ridiculous numbers of laws aimed at keeping law abding individuals from owning the kinds of guns they want, in the quantities they want, with as much ammunition as they want to stockpile, we have created a new class of negro.

I am a member of that class. I want to follow the law, but I also want the right to defend myself and my existence and my property by any means I deem reasonable. As a new negro, I must contend not only with do-gooders who believe they know better than I what types, quantity and quality of weapons I should be allowed (must of these do-gooders, if given ultimate power, would not even permit me a rock for head bashing), but with the criminal class who, no matter how many stupid gun laws are passed, will always find access to the weapons they desire.

In the mean time, this nation of the United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave, has locked up more citizens than any other nation in the world, per capita. These citizens are held on a variety of charges, most of which are non-violent. And from the violent among them, they learn to become animals. They learn the way of the gun. They learn to take whatever they want. And they force me to conclude that I too need guns to defend myself from them because when they emerge from their cells they will have morphed into committing violent crimes, compounding the problems we all must face.

As a modern negro, the stigmatized gun owner, I must speak out. I am not a threat to anyone who does not threaten me. I just want to be left alone to pursue my life as best I see fit. I do not want any part of your irrational fearmongering ways. I do not want to interact with your children who will cringe from me because I believe in the right of self-defense. But I must. No negro is an island.

Having said that, please take the time to read Defending Freedom. If you are reading this, and you are an American, you are part of a society that takes its freedom largely for granted. You are part of a society that will lose more and more freedom with each new socialist or authoritarian politican elected. One day, you will wake up and find that you too have joined the ranks of the modern negros. And what will you do then?