Quote of the day—David Kopel and Joseph Greenle

Firearms made possible the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Charles Cobb’s excellent book, “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible” describes how pacifist community organizers from the North learned to accept the armed protection of their black, rural communities.

The Deacons for Defense and Justice was an armed community defense organization, founded in 1965. With .38 Special revolvers and M1 carbines, they deterred terrorism in the “Klan country” region of Louisiana and Mississippi. When Dr. King led the “Meredith March against Fear” for voter registration in Mississippi, the Deacons provided armed security.

David Kopel and Joseph Greenle
August 22, 2017
The racist origin of gun control laws
[See also The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement and Negros with Guns. These books should be required reading in high schools.—Joe]

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7 thoughts on “Quote of the day—David Kopel and Joseph Greenle

  1. Yet another source for this bit of history is one of the chapters in Tonso’s “The gun culture and its enemies”, written by an activist (white, I think) who participated in the 1960s era civil rights work in the South. He clearly states the importance of personal firearms to be able to do that work, and to survive it.

  2. Dan Rather told an amusing anecdote about being saved from a shotgun-toting southern redneck at an anti-civil rights protest by his equally redneck local cameraman, who pulled a revolver to de-escalate the situation from a likely double murder to a mere verbal standoff.

    Dan emphasized in the story that CBS personnel were forbidden the use of weapons in their work, but that he appreciated in that instance that his crewman did not follow the rules.

    The irony of the story and the idiocy of Dan Rather would be amusing were he not such a force for evil in his world.

    • I guess it never occurred to Rather to condemn the victim disarmament policy of his employer. Perhaps he agreed with it. He’s certainly dumb enough.

  3. In case you know someone who might not be persuaded to read, but might watch a movie, this TV movie from 2003 fictionalizes true events about the founding of the “Deacons for Defense”, starring Forest Whitaker and Ossie Davis. Rated 7.0 on IMDB. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335034/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

    The only thing that surprised me about this movie was that it got made at all and appeared on network television… I mean… guns! Black people with guns!

    • It would be neat to see a similar movie about the Pink Pistols, with a reference to Operation Blazing Sword thrown in for good measure.

  4. Yes, I believe the primary, if not only, reason the Democrats wanted “gun control” in the 1960s was to control black people (today it’s to control everyone, so they’ve branched out a little bit). MLK of course was a Republican and an NRA member, and that must have stuck in the collective craw of the Dixie Democrats.

    Today, in a transparent act of projection, the Democrats call us the racists, and so it has come to be “racist” to advocate for the American principle which says all people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. If the Democrats’ and Progressive Republicans’ naked hypocrisy on race weren’t so destructive it would be hilariously funny.

    • The anti-black aspect of “gun control” goes back another century or more. One significant reason the 14th Amendment was proposed is to stop Southern states disarming of free blacks. Later on, gun bans were used to target other hated minorities, but blacks were the original target and still are. See for example http://www.constitution.org/cmt/cramer/racist_roots.htm

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