PA Bill Number: HB335
Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.
Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...
Last Action: Removed from table
Last Action Date: May 1, 2024
Should more black people carry guns? :: 04/04/2015
On Saturday, the world will stop once again -- as it should -- to remember arguably the greatest American of the last 100 years, Dr. Martin Luther King. April 4 will mark 47 years since an American sniper gunned down the civil rights leader on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.
The year that both King and Sen. Robert Kennedy were assassinated, 1968, was not so coincidentally one of the few moments that the nation was able to enact gun regulations. It was a time when the nation, collectively, was desperate to tackle a violent streak that seemed to be threatening the great American experiment.
It's become more than a bit of a cliche to say that an esteemed figure, like Martin Luther King, would be "spinning in his grave" over something that's happening now. But it's indeed hard to imagine what King -- who remained remarkably, stoically committed to the principle of non-violence, despite a lifetime of provocation -- would have thought of the words coming from one of his heirs at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC, the group that he founded and led during the 1960s.
This is what the SCLC chapter head in King's home state of Georgia -- a man named Samuel Mosteller -- told reporters last week. He was responding to a spate of shooting of black suspects by police, including two recent deaths near Atlanta -- one involving a mentally distressed Afghanistan war veteran who was not only unarmed but naked when an officer shot him.
The SCLC's Mosteller shocked a lot of people when he said African-Americans should "exercise their Second Amendment rights” in response to police-involved shootings. “You stand there, (police) shoot. You run, they shoot," he said. "We’re going to have to take a different tack.” Not surprisingly, the national SCLC suspended Mosteller and told him to undergo training in King's non-violent principles.
It would be an understatement to say that police shootings of African-American suspects have been in the news, especially since the Mike Brown killing and subsequent unrest in Ferguson. This week, I saw a shocking statistic -- that the more than 100 Americans killed by police during March was more than the number of people killed by police in the United Kingdom since 1900. But that's also just one aspect of the dangers of living in arguably the most violent developed nations in the world -- especially for those who live in poverty-stricken inner-city neighborhoods, where many blacks and other minorities are concentrated.
After crime soared in the 1970s, '80s and '90s, many leaders in the black community shared a common political goal -- getting guns off the street. Philadelphia's current Mayor Nutter could be a poster child for that movement -- throughout his two terms, Nutter has traded barbs with the NRA, called for a renewed ban on assault rifles, and led anti-gun coalitions. His views were shared by rank-and-file city voters.
But after decades of failed efforts to enact saner gun laws, the mood is changing. There's mounting evidence that African-Americans are embracing gun ownership.
A national poll published in December by the Pew Research Center chronicled this stunning change in attitudes. It reported: "Currently, 54% of blacks say gun ownership does more to protect people than endanger personal safety, nearly double the percentage saying this in December 2012 (29%)." Indeed, the massive and swift flip in black opinion was a key reason why for the first time over Americans overall support gun rights over so-called gun control.
I first heard of the Pew findings today in a broader NPR story about black gun ownership. Their piece quoted Detroit's African-American police chief, James Craig, as an example of changing opinions; he said gun ownership by law-abiding black citizens could be a strategy for dealing with slow police response times in poorly served, high-crime neighborhoods. It's the argument, basically, that the NRA has been putting out there for years -- just now reaching a new populations.
Except that putting more guns into circulation -- not just in the inner-city but anywhere in this ammo-crazed nation of ours -- is a truly terrible idea. Quite simply, the more firepower that's out there, the more people who will die needless deaths that will further destroy families and entire communities, where in places where more destruction is the last thing people need.
For every decent shop owner who turns away some punk robber with the business end of a .38, how many more cases will we see of toddlers getting their hands on licensed handguns and causing lethal mayhem? The truth is that no matter how many law-abiding people obtain permitted weapons, these guns will be used iin ways that were never intended or imagined -- to settle a beef, or, as is far too often the case, a lover's quarrel. The NPR story offered a classic example of how guns can go bad -- not just in the African-American community, but any community.
And there are still people in this community who believe that having more guns in general, both legal and illegal, just increases the likelihood of gun violence. Evelyn Marks is one of those people.
"Christina was my only child, I put everything I had into her," she says.
Her daughter, Christina Lazzana-Webster, was murdered by someone with a concealed-carry permit: her own husband. He killed her in their home. Marks assumes they'd been having an argument. She says the rise of legal guns doesn't make Detroit feel any safer to her. In fact, it's just the opposite.
That's exactly right. This new trend is a sad commentary on the current state of the violence debate in America -- and it's also infuriating. Make no mistake, a dangerous extremiist group called the NRA -- and the politicians who beg for its offerings on bended knee -- bears a disproportionate share of the blame. The gun lobby's growing success in killing even the mildest moves towards gun sanity in America, even after the senseless slaughter of babies in Newtown in 2012, has finally convinced rational people that we can never reduce the firepower on our streets -- that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
The circle on this is beyond ironic. History buffs remember that blacks arming themselves -- citing police brutality -- was a key tenet of the rise of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. A black open-carry event at the California State Capitol led the NRA and the state's then-new governor -- Ronald Reagan, perhaps you've heard of him? -- to endorse gun control measures aimed at the black power movement. Today's new developments may test how much has really changed in American society since 1967.
But in the meantime, what a blow to the memory of a man of peace like Martin Luther King as we recall this weekend what he fought for -- and how his efforts were cut short by a man with a high-powered rifle. The 2nd Amendment is a fact of life in America, and gun ownership should be legal...and safe, and also rare, and properly regulated. Giving up and giving in to the gun culture is never the answer -- in any neighborhood.
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/Should-more-black-people-carry-guns.html
