Unintended Consequences

Ahmaud Arbery. An innocent 25 year old man gunned down for the crime of jogging while black. 

Some will argue that this is a sensational statement, but I'm going to make some otherwise sensational comments about that below anyway so strap in. 

This happened in February. It is now May. The two white men involved in the slaying are not in jail. Under Georgia law, given a loose interpretation of the situation while ignoring key facts, what they did to this young man was legal. Emphasis on "loose" and "ignoring".

We wouldn't even be discussing this had not third party video of part of the tragedy surfaced. Any reasonable person, after watching the video, can conclude one simple set of facts. An unarmed person was shot and killed by two armed people. This is irrefutable.

Under Georgia law citizens can not only carry, but they have the power to arrest. And (this is where the slippery slope begins) they have the right of defense when attacked. And this is true seemingly regardless of who provoked the attack. In this case we now know clearly it was the two white gentleman that provoked the situation.

...

I want to try to deconstruct some of the ignorance and unintended consequences of the laws surrounding such situations that won't piss everyone off. And that's going to be difficult. To do this I'm going to naturally paint with a somewhat broad brush and admit that my own biases play some part as well.

But I also hope to belie some notions of political discourse that simply do not dovetail with reality.

There are foundations of the civil rights movement that rarely get discussed. And I could get lost in pointing some of these out. The secularists and atheists involved. The active homosexual leaders involved. The whites involved. I could write a dissertation about the inclusive and broad nature of the financial and foundational contributions of these groups but that would distract too much from my statements. 

What I can say is that I come by this knowledge largely from the efforts of my tiny little white girl mom. A mom who did actually fight in the trenches of the civil rights movement. A mom who helped establish North Carolina's first chapter of the NAACP. A mom who went to jail in the 60's during the Woolworths sit-ins.

A mom who largely got away with what were seen then as militant social actions precisely because she was a tiny white girl. 

This is the person who introduced me to shooting firearms and taught me how to do it well. Well after the crescendo of the Civil Rights Movement when I was 8 years old when she was on her second marriage and divorce and myself having a brother 10 years older she brought me out into a field with a Savage bolt action 22 rifle and began teaching me. I went on in later years to teach riflery and marksmanship at summer camp and became briefly involved in competitive IPSC pistol shooting sports. 

Being raised with secular humanist liberal progressive ideals and an appreciation of firearms didn't feel weird to me. Nor did it to my mother or any of her liberal contemporaries, regardless of the color of their skin.

But boy in this day and age it makes you feel like a unicorn in a wading pool of sharks.

All too often my opinions on the second amendment get dismissed by those on the left who claim that I just have a blind spot merely because I enjoy shooting sports. And perhaps that is correct to some degree. But I also realize just how ignorant so many people are of the history surrounding the Civil Rights Movement and how it ended up affecting firearms legislation.

Gun ownership was at the time a documented and well understood aspect of the movement. Dr. King's peaceful marches were a precise and powerful foil against the white oppression of the era, but there was context too that few take the time to digest. Public peaceful protests were to focus a lens on the less than peaceful retaliation by the state to leverage the media into the conversation. Privately, civil rights activists banded together in loose communities and groups to on a more intimate level publicly defend their neighborhoods with firearms. 

There was a sane divide and distinction that is lost in the conversation today. Civil Rights Activists realized in general that armed protests were not only counterproductive, they were foolish. Armed dissent might have made sense in 1800, but it certainly is a fantasy in 20th century America to believe that any group could overthrow the state. That's just madness and wishful thinking. But individuals living their lives with a firearm handy just in case and not making public political displays WAS a deterrent. And this was true in rural black America as much as it was true in urban black America. 

The modern divide between liberalism and firearms simply did not exist back then. And I argue that it doesn't really exist today. 

After Congress passed The Civil Rights Act of 1965, another law was passed shortly after, the National Firearms Act of 1968. And the proximity was no coincidence. 

Not to make any claims that the militant Black Panthers were fluffy kittens, but their armed protests for civil rights in California led us down the garden path of firearms legislation targeted at blacks in an attempt to seperate firearms from the liberal zeitgeist. A liberal collective made largely of completely safe living white people. And it worked.

Under then Governor Reagan we found the first legitimate attempts in generations at challenging the notion of the second amendment and its intent. Owning guns while black is as foundational and analogous with doing anything else.....like jogging.....while black. 

These legislative moves that began in California swept the nation. A nation in turmoil due to the civil rights movement, the counterculture movement, and the protests against the Vietnam War. And these culminated in the National Firearms Act. 

Largely seen today as a benign and sensible set of legislation, in its day it was equally an attempt to disarm en masse urban population centers. It established the legal precedents used today to continue a narrative about firearms as a social ill. And while parts of that argument seem to make sense on the surface it has institutionalized a divide between liberal values and the unfortunate reality of defending those values. It is a perhaps sad reality to admit to, but carrying a small pistol in an urban environment prior to this wasn't a radical act. It was a realistic act living inside the pressures of culture and poverty in inner city environments. In neighborhoods where ethnic groups preyed on their own this led to only the disarming of those.....who obey the law. It is no wonder that the lawlessness of inner cities of the era merely got worse. 

Unintended consequences. Naive ideas. Solutions that in a vacuum make sense, while completely ignoring human reality through ignorance. A culture where buying a gun at Sears, or Ace Hardware, or a corner drug store wasn't weird in the slightest. 

The danger, the real and legitimate danger of tinkering with the second amendment, has historically done little but exacerbate problems in society. Whether it be to limit or expand the rights to bear arms, it had created unfortunate scenarios that further remove ones liberty from the conversation and hand the rights over that conversation to a body politic.

Just as jogging while black has become a social and political reality we have to contend with, so has being armed while black. 

You can't in good conscience talk about one without recognizing the other......nor fail to  recognize that we have done this to ourselves.