Guns, Slavery, and the Holocaust

[DonViejo]

by Michael Tomasky Jan 12, 2013 4:45 AM EST

Michael Tomasky on the nonsensical, unbelievably offensive argument that gun rights help protect minorities from oppression.

They still save the Hitler invocations for the special occasions, so you could tell earlier this week when Matt Drudge went with his absurd Hitler and Stalin homepage about Obama and guns that we are at what the paranoid right thinks of as a watershed moment. Let’s hope to God it is. Drudge’s page was of course crazy: The whiff of fascism in this gun debate sure isn’t emanating from the White House, but from the direction of the forces using the techniques for which Hitler was famous during his rise to power—accusing the other side of doing precisely what he and his henchmen were doing, inverting the truth on its head in ways that offended common sense and morality at every turn.

Let’s start with yesterday’s news about Gun Appreciation Day, the invention of a certain Larry Ward. He is planning the big day to coincide with the president’s inauguration, set for Monday, January 21. When reminded by a CNN interviewer that this was also the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, Ward, like all propagandists, was ready with an answer: “I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country’s founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history.”


It’s always a tip off when they say King “would have agreed with me.” We’re about to endure another round of this again, when King day comes and conservatives dish out the obligatory “King would be a conservative today” columns. It’s completely ridiculous, as is the idea that armed slaves would have managed anything more than the wholesale slaughter by their far better-armed masters of many of their number.

But Ward, it turns out, walks a well-worn path of gun advocates trying to pretend that they pursue the policies they pursue for the sake of the powerless. In the 1970s, the first big gun debate in the country after the 1968 Gun Control Act—which the NRA supported—concerned Saturday Night Specials, the small, cheap handguns used in many crimes in that decade when street crime skyrocketed. The NRA needed an argument that might land sympathetically on the ear of a natural foe, and then-leader Harlon Carter, the man who politicized and radicalized what had theretofore been a moderate and sensible group, found one. As Rick Perlstein notes in The Nation, Carter dubbed the Saturday Night Special “the girl’s best friend,” arguing that it was “small enough to fit into a woman’s purse.”

read more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/12/guns-slavery-and-the-holocaust.html

[lunatica]

1. Yeah, Blacks dragged against their will over here in shackles

would have access to guns. Sure.

Talk about a straw man. That reasoning is sickening.

[Sunlei]

2. The NRA and the KKK rose-up together, hand in hand with similar agenda on some issues.

All the nazi media today, I guess its just paid by Koch missing the good old days when Erich Koch was a Gauleiter of the Nazi Party, Ilse Koch made items from human skin (inmates called her The Bitch of Buchenwald)

Her husband Karl Otto Koch was the Commander of the death camp.

Koch never brings up his past and his family history, but he sure doesn't mind at all when that horror is used in todays politics by his republican media gangs.