Once you identify the origins of US gun culture in the slave patrols of the Old South and the white-settler roots of the country as a whole, you can go either way:
Since Blacks -- especially free Blacks -- have been historically excluded or restricted from the right to bear arms, working-class whites should also give it up, or at least submit to more stringent gun control favored by liberals of the Democratic Party;
or,
Since Blacks -- especially free Blacks -- have been historically excluded or restricted from the right to bear arms, they ought to vigorously assert it as a necessary precondition for gaining freedom, dignity, and full citizenship, rolling back the wars on crimes in general and on drugs in particular, in the process changing gun culture of the United States.
Looking at Michael Moore's <em>Bowling for Columbine</em>, you would never think of Blacks, Indians, Latinos, Asians, and working-class whites on the left as having ever asserted their right to bear arms, although US history is full of working-class attempts at self-defense: e.g.,
<blockquote>Acute is Craig S. Pascoe's piece on the 1950s grass-roots African American civil rights leader Robert F. Williams of Monroe, North Carolina, a World War II veteran who ingeniously obtained a charter from the National Rifle Association to found a local chapter composed of blacks known as the Monroe Rifle Club. Vigorous armed self-defense by Williams's organization thwarted the Ku Klux Klan element in its violent campaign against Monroe blacks until the noncommunist Williams was forced to flee, ironically, to Cuba in 1961. (Richard Maxwell Brown, "Book Review: <em>Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History</em>. Ed. by Michael A. Bellesiles. [New York: New York University Press, 1999. x, 453 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-8147-1295-9. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8147-1296-7]," <em>The Journal of American History</em> 87.3, <a href="http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/87.3/br_7.html">December 2000</a>)</blockquote>
>Say what you want about Michael Moore, but he's a genuine
>progressive who doesn't deserve to be lumped with
>not-as-smart-as-he-thinks-he-is libertarian Bill Maher or
>conventional Clinton liberal Al Franken.
Moore lumped himself with Maher and Franken by jumping on the Anybody But Nader gang's bandwagon, except that, to my knowledge, Maher and Franken didn't go so far as to endorse and write a fulsome praise for Wesley Clark.
<blockquote>On the issue of gun control, this hunter and gun owner will close the gun show loophole (which would have helped prevent the massacre at Columbine) and he will sign into law a bill to create a federal ballistics fingerprinting database for every gun in America (the DC sniper, who bought his rifle in his own name, would have been identified after the FIRST day of his killing spree). He is not afraid, as many Democrats are, of the NRA. His message to them: "You like to fire assault weapons? I have a place for you. It's not in the homes and streets of America. It's called the Army, and you can join any time!" (Michael Moore, "I'll Be Voting For Wesley Clark/Good-Bye Mr. Bush," <a href="http://clark04.com/moore/">January 14, 2004 </a>)</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>