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African Americans, of all people, should be opposed to gun control laws

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The Democrats traditionally receive over 90% of the African American vote in every election. Before 1932, the Republican party received about that same percentage of the Black vote. That was because back then Blacks remembered that it was the Republican party that freed them from slavery. Well, that’s history. That was then and this is now.

African Americans seldom depart from Democrat party dogma, gay marriage being an exception however. Gun control is no exception. Blacks generally follow the Democrat party line on gun control. Ban every gun you can, every time you can.  In the upcoming great gun control debate of 2013 Blacks will no doubt hold fast to that position.

There are a few things that should give them pause, such as the racist roots of gun control laws in America. There is another bit of history that should be of interest to everyone, Black or otherwise. It’s just a short little story about a rebellious slave from Allen Guelzo’s book Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction:

Frederick Bailey, also born a slave in Maryland in 1818, was turned over by a fearful owner to a professional “slave-breaker,” Edward Covey, who whipped and beat Bailey without mercy for six months to bring him into “submission.”

Frederick Bailey returned to his master, scheming all the while how to buy his freedom with the money he earned on odd jobs performed for other whites. But when his master suspended his outside work privileges, Bailey decided that he had paid his master all he deserved, and in 1838 he boarded a train headed for Philadelphia, dressed as a sailor and carrying false identification papers. He found his way to New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he changed his name to Frederick Douglass. In 1841, Douglass was recruited as an agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society; four years later he published his “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.” Within a decade he had become the most famous African American on the continent, and one of slavery’s deadliest enemies.

In September 1851 a Maryland slave owner named Edward Gorsuch crossed into Pennsylvania in pursuit of four runaways. Gorsuch enlisted the aid of a federal marshal and a posse and tracked the runaways to the home of William Parker, a free black, in Christiana, Pennsylvania. There the runaways and their allies shot it out with the posse, killing Gorsuch; Parker and the runaways immediately fled for Canada. Frederick Douglass, then living and editing an anti-slavery newspaper in Rochester, New York, sheltered them and got the fugitives on board a Great Lakes steamer. At parting, one of them gave Douglass a memento that he treasured all his life: Edward Gorsuch’s revolver.

As this little vignette shows, a gun was a valuable tool to Frederick Douglass, and Gorsuch’s revolver was special because it had previously been used by a slave master as a tool of subjugation, and was now in the hands of a former slave, using it as a tool of freedom. After slavery was ended and Jim Crow was instituted in its place, Blacks needed guns to protect their lives and freedom from those who resented that they were no longer slaves and want to subjugate them again under what amounted to a new form of slavery.

Frederick Douglass would no doubt be troubled by the political stance of so many of today’s African Americans who must have forgotten their history.  Otis McDonald of Chicago might also wonder why so many African Americans don’t see the light on this issue.


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