By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
A new Op-Ed posted at the National Review by Cody J. Wisniewski describes the impact of gun control laws on minority and poor citizens, and points an accusing finger at self-described “progressives” who support increasingly restrictive gun laws, wondering how they can claim to be “champions of the people.”
“Gun control disproportionately impacts the poor and minorities and puts them at greater risk of prosecution,” says Wisniewski, director of the Mountain States Legal Foundation’s Center to Keep and Bear Arms.
The author chastises liberal gun prohibitionists for supporting laws that make it more difficult, if not impossible, for people of color and low or no income to legally purchase firearms for their personal protection.
“But minorities and those living in poor areas are much more likely to experience crime,” Wisniewski observes, “especially violent crime, compared with their fellow citizens. These individuals are in particular need of the ability to defend themselves, and they have the same right to do so as someone living in a safe, upper-class suburb; and yet gun-control laws eviscerate this right for vulnerable Americans in several ways.”
He is not the first person to write about the racist roots of gun control. Historian Clayton Cramer talked about it nearly 30 years ago in an essay titled “The Racist Roots of Gun Control.”
A quarter-century later, attorneys and Second Amendment scholars David Kopel and Joseph Greenlee collaborated on an Op-Ed in The Hill, similarly headlined, “The racist origins of gun control laws.”
Going back to the infamous “Black Codes” of the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, any student of U.S. history would recognize the purpose was to prevent freedmen from exercising their rights.
“The entire history of gun control has been hellbent on depriving minorities of their rights,” Wisniewski states. “Before the founding of the United States, some colonies prohibited freedmen, slaves, and indentured servants from possessing firearms. Others prevented Catholics from gun ownership. Massachusetts prohibited gunsmiths from repairing or selling firearms to Native Americans.
“Despite being lauded as a progressive necessity,” he contends, “gun control, at its core, has always been discriminatory against ethnic, political, and religious minorities, as well as the poorest members of our society.”
Wisniewski’s National Review article might be considered “required reading” for any self-absorbed gun prohibition activist. It effectively “pins the tail on the donkey,” which adds to the irony because that has become the symbol of the party to which anti-gunners belong, or at least to which they reflexively give their votes.
