Quote of the day—Clayton Cramer

Cobb describes how the increasing use of federal law against lynchings in the 1950s played a part in restraining the most outrageous forms of anti-black violence, but the relatively relaxed gun control laws of the South and the widespread culture of gun ownership played a part as well. “Nighttime marauders had learned to keep a more respectful distance from their targets because the targets were increasingly prone to shoot back.” The return of so many combat-experienced black soldiers from the two wars meant that terrorizing blacks was no longer a risk-free activity (pp. 123-4). Indeed, it could and sometimes did get Klansmen killed.

Clayton Cramer
April 11, 2014
‘This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed:’ Guns and the Civil Rights Movement
[Cramer is referring to Charles E. Cobb Jr. book This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (not yet released).

As was reported in Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms (Social Institutions and Social Change) by Wright and Rossi (there is a second edition out too: Armed and Considered Dangerous: New Second Edition) violent criminals are far less concerned with the possibility of being caught, convicted, and sent to prison by the police than they are with a private citizen shooting them. The reason for this is that punishment via the legal system is at some nebulous point in the future, of relatively low probability, and most likely, of non lethal consequence. Whereas the private citizen with a gun, motivated by a violent attack on their person or a family member, is able and willing to deliver a lethal blow in seconds.

I expect the average Klansmen was of similar intelligence to the average violent criminal, of which he was subset, and could do the probabilistic calculations necessary to appropriately conclude there were more healthy life choices available.—Joe]

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12 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Clayton Cramer

  1. A quibble with your characterization of klansmen: I think you might be confusing the apparently stupid modern Klan members, who seem to have trouble marching and wearing a bedsheet simultaneously, with the Klan of 50 or 100 years ago.

    In the South, the Klan included civic leaders, police, government officials, rich and poor. Essentially, the Democrat party in many southern states was the Klan. And they weren’t killing people for sport, but rather to maintain the political power of their one-Party rule in those southern states, by denying economic and political power to anyone else.

    The Democrat party has been, since the Civil War, a party of political oppression and terroristic bent, willing to do unspeakable things to obtain and maintain power without regard to anyone else’s rights, the law, morality or ethical behavior. The shame of the modern age is that the Republicans are now aping this behavior in most disgusting ways.

  2. Mikee, I think your description is accurate, but that doesn’t contradict Joe’s description. Low intelligence “civic leaders” are a dime a dozen.
    There is another good description of what Mr. Cramer is talking about in one of the chapters of Tonso’s “The Gun Culture and its Enemies” — written by a guy who was actively working in the civil rights movement in the 1960 and experienced first hand that he, and the people he was supporting, needed to be armed at all times.

  3. I believe that there is nothing more frightening to the common criminal, whether working within or outside of government, than a calm, cool-headed, informed, rational, ARMED citizen. I believe it keeps many Democrats and Republicans, IRS or BLM agents, et al, awake at night.

    In fact there is no bigger threat to the power-grabbing political class than strong, knowledgeable, honest, productive, principled and resolute citizens. To them we are “terrorists” in the same sense that an armed home-owner is a “terrorist” to the burglar.

    They MUST do everything they can do to weaken, divide, distract and discourage us at every turn. WE are their primary focus at all times, as the host is to a parasite, for without us they have neither sustenance nor opposition. Even the dumbest, most corrupt and violent BATFE flunky, or Democrat party hack, Alinskiite/Progressive understands this at some primitive level, the way a leech or a tick understands that it’s host is both it’s source of life and a major threat to its existence.

  4. Does this book mention Martin Luther King (who was, unfortunately, killed with a gun)?

    • Yes. Of course.

      I don’t have a prerelease copy of the book but read Cramer’s review of it to see mention of King.

    • Here we go again, with an attempt to insinuate a fellowship, or moral equivalence, between armed criminals and armed defenders. Nice try, ubu, but we’ve been dealing with that old play for generations.

      How many default leftists know that he was a gun owner, and NRA member, and that he had applied for a concealed carry permit and was denied?

      • Guns protected the civil rights movement, a gun killed Rev Dr. Martin Luther King.
        In other news, knives kill tens of thousands every year around the world, and doctors stick knives in patients every day in hospitals around the world.

        Come, now, we must demonstrate against Knife deaths and knife violence by demonstrating outside surgical hospitals against the doctors there.

        It’s for the children.

        • Should we bring our own signs, or will the union be providing them?
          THE PEOPLE, UNITED, WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED!

  5. “the increasing use of federal law against lynchings in the 1950s”

    This is one of the reasons I’d love to find an honest (ie, no axes to grind, no conspiracies to push) history of J. Edgar Hoover. We’re supposed to demonize him, supposed to think he had these massive files he used to blackmail people, but…

    …I’ve never heard any evidence he actually blackmailed anyone. Surely it would have come out by now, right?

    …He was the head of the primary counter-espionage agency. If he hadn’t tracked Soviet agents snuggling up to, say, MLK, Jr, he’d have been derelict in his duty. Notice that it was decades after they were both dead before the material the FBI surveillance turned up came out.

    …He truly did fight against domestic terrorists like the Klan, at a time when the Klan was being protected by Democrats in Congress — north AND south. Maybe Hoover used his files to protect his own position — given the outcome, I’m not entirely sure that wasn’t the right thing to do.

    • I’m sure Hoover had the Venona decrypts back when they were freshly decrypted, so he KNEW how badly the US government had been compromised and suborned.

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