You are not only confused, but if you actually believe the Panthers were guarding the poll-disillusion. And Dems who support anti 2A legislation and then take photo ops near election time, they really are posers. I marvel politicians like Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein keeping a straight face when they both have concealed carry.

Regarding the article, I thought it was well done. I found nothing in your comments that did anything remotely to refute what was printed.

Mark N.: FWIW, it looks like you can pick up a used copy of that book for 1 cent (plus shipping) these days. But an online summary is nonetheless useful for those of us who are a bit lazy and have short attention spans; thanks!

RPT: DK:Thanks. Perhaps my connections were not made as aptly as they could have been. Of course there is no uniform conservative position on all issues. But it still seems to me that “liberals” or “leftists” or whatever pejorative term the average R/Con commentator chooses to adopt will be given no slack for their exercise of 2A rights by anyone not in the R/Con camp.

What pejorative term other than “liberals” or “leftists” would you prefer?

In the bad old days where I was raised, and where my family was from, local law enforcement was commonly complicit in the persecution of blacks. In my view, this is exactly what the second amendment was written for. If you find yourself in a situation where people are apt to kill you, and the only agents of the law you have access to are wrongfully on your persecutor’s side, then hell yes! Shoot back! If the local police department will stand by and watch someone hang you, whip you or kill your family because of the color of your skin, then what is more American: shrug your shoulders and give up? Or fight back with a gun? I’m white, but can you guess what will happen if the Klan came to burn a cross on my lawn? Same thing that would have happened if they did it on my father’s lawn – some dead people in white robes and hoods would have been the result.

Matthew Carberry: I rather like that the President and the SS didn’t make a big deal about the weapons lawfully carried to his event in NH, it showed maturity and class.

Agree. The hilarious part was the folks who whined, “Guns don’t belong at presidential rallies,” forgetting the dozens of firearms that come with the president.

Mark N.: The Marxist, revolutionary Black Panthers defending the 2nd amendment, and conservative activists led by Ronald Reagan banning guns as part of a law-and-order agenda!

In Texas, for the same reason including Black Panthers, firearms are outlawed within 1000 feet of a place of execution on the day of an execution.

Donald Kilmer: I’m 3/4 of the way through this book. It appears to be pretty well documented with footnotes. Almost reads like movie script, so thumbs up.

Here’s the Deacons for Defense movie.

@losantiville: Good point. Kate’s account is compelling, at least in my view. It’s in this book: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0884270335/thevolocons0d-20/

RowerinVA:Where police are not doing their jobs of protecting oppressed group, it is usually a passive failure — acting, essentially, as if the oppressed group is on its own — rather than an active support of the bad guys.That leaves the small group of oppressors on its own as well; the police aren’t actively backing up the bad guys.

Excellent point. Citizens need to have guns to protect themselves from actual criminals, because — in many neighborhoods — the police are not interested in doing their jobs. Calling 911 is not a defense to home robbery; a shotgun is. The straw man argument that “small arms won’t protect you from the all powerful US military, so the 2nd Amendment is outdated” misses this point. The 2nd Amendment is not simply to protect us from the military, but is necessary to have a well ordered citizenry.

If anyone wants to see what happens when gun control advocates get their way, just look at Mexico City, Tijuana, Juarez, or pretty much any part of Mexico. When the people are disarmed, the criminal gangs run wild. The police can barely defend themselves, let alone the general population (although the police still manage to make time to collude with the gangs and shake down the locals for bribes).

Either it is acceptable for everyone to carry guns or it isn’t. You can’t say that the way someone else carries a gun is offensive because you don’t like what they stand for, while being an advocate for guns for all.

Charles, that doesn’t really make a lot of sense. There is an enormous difference between criminalizing (or objecting to) what someone DOES with a gun vs. the mere act of possessing one. Are you saying that, to be consistent, I must support a murderer’s right to use a gun if I want to support a victim’s right to defend himself with a gun?

As PatHMV said, if someone wants to carry a nightstick (or a gun) when walking down the street, fine. If, however, they want to use said nightstick or gun to intimidate voters at a polling place, I’m going to have to object. I fail to see the conflict between the two positions.

Mark N.: I believe the state capitol incident happened in the middle of the controversy rather than being what precipitated it, but yeah it was part of the attempt to use gun control to suppress the Black Panthers. According to this guy (pp. 121–122), the timeline was roughly:1966: Black Panthers form, invoking a 2nd-amendment right to arm themselves in defense of black neighborhoodsEarly 1967: The California legislature considers a gun-control bill, fairly openly aimed at disarming the BPJune 1967: Armed Black-Panther activists disrupt a session of the state legislature in protest at the gun-control lawJune 1967: Ronald Reagan signs the Mulford Act, outlawing firearm possession in public places or vehicles (effectively, anywhere outside the home)The politics of it do make for interesting bedfellows. The Marxist, revolutionary Black Panthers defending the 2nd amendment, and conservative activists led by Ronald Reagan banning guns as part of a law-and-order agenda!

Thanks for the tidbits. Your observation about how politics makes strange bedfellows is dead on. I believe it is precisely because of these inconsistencies that we have problems / conflicts we have today.

My interest in the Right to Keep and Bear Arms started at dusk on a lonely two-lane road through the piney woods of Franklin County, NC in the summer of 1967. I had a summer job as a “community organizer” for OEO. (Gasp, just like Obama.) This was only three years after Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney were killed with the help of the police in Mississippi. I got harassed and bumped by some folks in a pickup. Eventually I outraced them back to Durham. The next day at work my partner says “you need a gun.” So we drove out to a rural bar and he got one for me (they’d have never sold to me). I loaded it up, dropped it in my suit pocket and carried it all summer. I had to display it twice too but that worked to stop my assailants.

ruufles: Yes: IOKIYAR

Armed New Blank Panther party members protested near Bush in 2000 with no arrests.

2.)The KKK was the terrorist arm of the Democratic party.

Nick42: What amazes me about these stories is the ability to challenge local police without interference from other jurisdictions. I guess it’s largely a difference of modern policing and technology on one hand and the political and moral issues on the other.

Sheriff departments in the rural deep South during the ’60s were more likely than not to be affiliated with the Klan and be corrupt. In Tennessee, where I grew up, the sheriff was elected and his deputies were the last of the non-civil service spoils system left. If you went against the Klan, you went against the sheriff and because the Klan was involved in many illegal activities the sheriff did not want an investigation at any level. I suspect that the local politics were such that the sheriff didn’t want to bring in the state police force for fear of becoming the subject of an investigation themselves. Sheriffs and governors were often at odds and the sheriff was usually the sole arbitrator of justice at the county level. Bringing in the state police meant a loss of power.

In addition, white sheriffs usually had a relationship with black citizens who often had some voting privileges especially in the Upper South and certainly had some influence by other means (bootlegging payoffs, for example.) The relationship between the sheriff and blacks was never simple in the rural county I lived in.

If WWII veterans decided to fight back as they did in LA and NC then the sheriff, who only had a limited number of deputies and incentives to not expand the investigation to the state level, had to compromise. This could take form in not harrassing armed individuals or even protecting them from the Klan. The same thing happened with bootleggers and gamblers, especially if they bribed the sheriff.

If you look at the Know Nothing movement in the 1850s you will find similar incidents. Catholic churches were burnt down in Philadelphia and threats made in NYC. The bishop of NYC mentioned that a lot of Protestant churches would have been burnt and riots occured if something like that occured in NYC. It did not.

One of the reasons was the fact that the bishop was serious and had the forces (and the history of riots) to back him up. In the South there was a history of slave insurrection that still lived in the memories of some. The sheriffs knew what could have happened and they knew that there was no way that they could have supressed such an event because they were outnumbered, even with the Klan who would have had to protect their own families if things “got out of hand.”

When these good people fought back as a group there were consequences. The corrupt local law enforcement usually came to the conclusion that it was not worth doing business as usual and the Klan realized that they no longer had the power (look at the Notre Dame/Klan incident in Indiana)when people fought back.

In this country it is now a civil right to be able to defend yourself with a gun so I guess that we can say that the final act of the Civil Rights movement occured with Heller. (After all, William Kuntsler was the lawyer who got Robert Williams his rights back.)

If the blacks were facing a military situation involving hundreds of vigilantes and a backup force of the police, arming the blacks would have been pointless or even counterproductive. But that’s not how oppression and police failure usually works. The violent oppressors are usually few in number (as well as young, male, disorganized, and stupid). Where police are not doing their jobs of protecting oppressed group, it is usually a passive failure — acting, essentially, as if the oppressed group is on its own — rather than an active support of the bad guys. That leaves the small group of oppressors on its own as well; the police aren’t actively backing up the bad guys. In that context, arming the oppressed group can make a real difference. Nothing kills the thrill of oppression, and the fragile cohesion / power dynamic of an oppressive gang, so much as having a few failures and finding out that the rest of society isn’t backing your sorry ass.

Nick42: I haven’t read it, but Deacons of Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement has been on my wishlist for a while.

I’m 3/4 of the way through this book. It appears to be pretty well documented with footnotes. Almost reads like movie script, so thumbs up.

I’m a little surprised that you would be so quick to jump to conclusions.

Regarding the earlier comment about being illegal to parade under arms – I believe there were several cases of militas parading in front of state or town governmental bodies to indicate their preference for a particular course of action. I’m fairly sure I read that in To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant’s Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement

What amazes me about these stories is the ability to challenge local police without interference from other jurisdictions. I guess it’s largely a difference of modern policing and technology on one hand and the political and moral issues on the other.

One hard lesson is that Communism made enormous inroads because nobody else —no other group, party, or position— was willing to support blacks’ rights. Commies were the only game in town, and that influence still echoes today.

“But a very curious thing happens, even to liberals, at the thought of a black man having arms in his possession. Their deep and pervading sense of racial guilt suggests to them, fearfully, that the black man has an accumulated moral justification to use them, and probably will.”

“All the prophetical qualities the white liberals recognized in Williams, went whirling over the dam of their own racist fears; they practiced, unconsciously, the same sort of denial of basic rights for which they held the White Citizens Council and the Klan in such contempt.” – Truman Nelson, People With Strength In Monroe, North Carolina

Williams‘ story is a real tragedy. He was a great man, a great patriot; caught in the machinations of the state that left him with no possible good choices.
.

† Negroes With Guns is a 1962 book by Williams. A 2004 PBS video uses the same name.

I just reread the ending of the reprint. After he got tired of Cuba he came back home, and NAACP and Kuntsler got the charges dropped, and the author went to work in the Chinese studies department at the University of Michigan.

Gene Hoffman:
There are actually two historical examples. First the National Firearms Act barred individuals from owning machine guns, short barreled shotguns, and short barreled rifles without paying the then confiscatory tax of $200. Individuals had to get sign off from your local sheriff/chief. Corporations (like the Ford Motor Company and the Pinkertons for which the exception seems certainly to have been created) didn’t need that signature.Earlier, Presser v. Illinois which the 7th Circuit partially relied upon to rule against McDonald was a case about labor unions. Stealing form wikipedia but knowing the history to be accurate, “Herman Presser was part of a citizen militia group, the Lehr und Wehr Verein (Instruct and Defend Association), a group of armed ethnic German workers, associated with the Socialist Labor Party. The group had been formed to counter the armed private armies of companies in Chicago.”The Supreme Court found that Illinois could make it a crime to parade with arms — a particular restriction that likely remains constitutional under the separate actual militia power in the Constitution.–Gene

Thank you as well. This history is consistent with my guess.

Butters: “Are there other examples of gun control regulations passed in order to deprive citizen groups of self-defense rights? Perhaps in the context of the labor movement, for example, to make sure that only the Pinkertons were armed?”http://www.guncite.com/journals/gun_control_wtr8512.html
http://www.lizmichael.com/tahmasse.htm
http://www.guncite.com/journals/cd-reg.html

Thank you. This is very interesting history.

Realist: Negros with Guns is also very instructive on the role of firearms in that era. … Several of the rifles were WWII german surplus, which the state used as evidence that the blacks were nazi communists.

The very worst kind of communists…

or Nazis for that matter.

rpt: Are there other examples of gun control regulations passed in order to deprive citizen groups of self-defense rights? Perhaps in the context of the labor movement, for example, to make sure that only the Pinkertons were armed?

There are actually two historical examples. First the National Firearms Act barred individuals from owning machine guns, short barreled shotguns, and short barreled rifles without paying the then confiscatory tax of $200. Individuals had to get sign off from your local sheriff/chief. Corporations (like the Ford Motor Company and the Pinkertons for which the exception seems certainly to have been created) didn’t need that signature.

Earlier, Presser v. Illinois which the 7th Circuit partially relied upon to rule against McDonald was a case about labor unions. Stealing form wikipedia but knowing the history to be accurate, “Herman Presser was part of a citizen militia group, the Lehr und Wehr Verein (Instruct and Defend Association), a group of armed ethnic German workers, associated with the Socialist Labor Party. The group had been formed to counter the armed private armies of companies in Chicago.”

The Supreme Court found that Illinois could make it a crime to parade with arms – a particular restriction that likely remains constitutional under the separate actual militia power in the Constitution.

-Gene

http://www.guncite.com/journals/gun_control_wtr8512.html
http://www.lizmichael.com/tahmasse.htm
http://www.guncite.com/journals/cd-reg.html