…and it’s been done before and I’ve mentioned it here on a thread or two with general agreement: encourage minorities to legally open-carry.
I can’t think of a greater example of modern racism in our society than knowing what would happen to a minority member exercising their god-given right to walk around with an exposed gun compared to a white guy.
A few years ago, coming home after work, I drove into my neighborhood and saw a guy and a lady walking a tiny dog… completely ordinary, but the guy had a rifle slung over his shoulder. I couldn’t help but think that if this family was black and some homeowner called the cops, this guy would end up dead. But a white guy? He’s just gun nut. No biggie. He’s not out to hurt anyone.
A few viral photos of minorities in public places carrying guns would scare the living shit out of pro-gun people. This happened in California when the Black Panthers entered a courthouse armed. Those laws were changed REALLY quick.
I’m not actually a fan of gun control laws, mainly because I think the cat is already out of the bag, or that we should always have the right to defend ourselves, but also because there are more important hills to die on if I want to live in a more liberal society. But I do think if anyone was serious about changing the laws, promoting open carry for everyone would be the quickest way to do it.
This is a meme that’s been floating around on Facebook for years. Sadly, I think it would work, but I hate to think about how many black people would die in the process.
Heck, they’re already getting killed by the police with out guns. Just imagine how many more would get shot WITH guns.
I agree that the American gun sanity toothpaste has been squoze out of the tube and ain’t going back any time soon. But I think I’d support a ban on concealed carry. If you’re carrying a handgun, don’t be shy about it!
I always wondered: it’s one thing when the police surround a single man who doesn’t have a gun and shout at him. Or he does have a gun, but isn’t reaching for it, and he just wants to live. But the police give impossible, contradictory commands or just start shooting no matter what.
But what if there’s 10 men armed with rifles, in some militia group, and only 5 police armed with handguns? And one of the men needs to be arrested.
Somehow I suspect they are real polite. Now the police try to defuse the situation, they probably politely tell the man and his buddies he needs to come with them in a polite, civilized manner without pulling their handguns.
But even if they don’t - if they use their usual tactics - and the man puts his hands up in the air and then gets shot dead after the police tell him to pull out his wallet - what now?
His buddies just witnesses a wrongful police shooting. And instead of being helpless bystanders, they all have rifles. I wonder how this works legally. There are various self defense laws in states that allow open carry, laws authorizing deadly force to prevent a felony, and so on. A wrongful police shooting you just saw happen sounds like it would qualify…
Yup. Modern gun-rights culture has already got a huge amount of legacy racism baked into it. In fact, traditional racist notions of scary black men with guns are one of the main drivers perpetuating modern gun-rights culture.
In our cultural stereotypes, black men with guns are coded “scary criminals” while white men with guns are coded “salt-of-the-earth common-man patriotic defenders”. (Unless the white men with guns are getting out of shiny black vehicles, in which case they’re coded “mobsters” or “international-villain henchmen”, or are standing by themselves in a crowd and looking angry, in which case they’re coded “mass shooters”.)
Encouraging more black men to have guns will not change those stereotypes, nor will it promote more reasonable gun-control laws. It will just provide more fuel for the apocalyptic fantasies that gun-rights culture already feeds on.
You don’t even have a rock.
Your “solution”, if not deliberately set up to cause harm to others, will certainly end with that happening. Would you happen to have any solutions that involve you personally doing anything that risky?
Funny that your notion of “evidence” for racism is a hypothetical about what would happen to a black person who practices open carry. To actually be evidence it would have to have actually happened, and then to have found to happen at a greater rate than white people.
Um, AFAICT the OP nowhere claimed that his hypothetical was any kind of “evidence” for anything. The post appears to be simply a description of the OP’s personal opinion, along with the remark in passing that some other people share this opinion.
Yeah, it really does sound like the OP is saying “Why don’t we get the blacks to stick their necks out for all of our benefit? What’s the worst that can happen?” I don’t think he intended this sentiment, but that’s how it comes across.
I very much doubt that today’s white gun-rights conservatives would respond to increased black gun ownership and carry by supporting gun-control laws. Most of them would probably advocate other kinds of crackdowns and enhanced police militarization instead. (Some of them, of course, aren’t personally racist against blacks, but all of them are living amidst the ubiquitous cultural stereotypes about the assumed scary criminality of black men with guns.)
If black people went around openly carrying guns as the norm, the response of many white gun owners would probably be to try to engineer some law whereby blacks are restricted from guns but whites are not. They are not likely to embrace some solution of “Okay, then NOBODY gets to keep or carry guns.”
