Charles W. Cooke - Do Black People Have Equal Gun Rights?

Charles W. Cooke, one of National Review's newest and gifted writers confronts the NRA on its past hypocrisy. Despite their rhetoric, the historical record shows that Liberals, Conservatives, and the NRA have not always been on the side of the Second Amendment, especially where blacks were concerned. 

The New York Times:

The Cheetum family in Doerun, Ga., in 1950. Credit Bettmann/Corbis

The first major ban on the open carrying of firearms — a Republican-led bill that was drafted after Black Panthers began hanging around the State Legislature in Sacramento with their guns on display — was signed in 1967 by none other than Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. The federal Gun Control Act of 1968 was primarily a reaction to the scourge of “Saturday night specials” — cheap handguns owned by the poor and the black. The National Rifle Association opposed neither law.

So the fact that one of the seminal Second Amendment cases in American history is named for a black plaintiff is a beautiful and moving thing indeed. McDonald v. Chicago, argued in 2010, was brought by Otis McDonald, a 76-year-old black man tired of watching his neighborhood give way to crime and gang warfare. The Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that the Second Amendment applied not just to all people, but to the states as well as to the federal government, and that Chicago was therefore not permitted to prohibit Mr. McDonald from keeping a handgun for his defense.

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The two articles below go into greater detail about the NRA's double standard when it came to whites and guns vs. white urban immigrants and southern blacks.

The Secret History of Guns
Gun Control, Racism, and the NRA