From: [b--o--h] at [mdd.comm.mot.com] (Greg Booth)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: Gun Control as Race Control
Date: 3 Jan 1994 09:33:07 -0800


13.	Gun Control and Racism

                   Gun Control: White Man's Law

                      by William R. Tonso

 Chances are that you've never heard of General Laney. He 
hasn't had a brilliant military career, at least as far as I know. 
In fact, I'm not certain that he's even served in the military. 
General, you see, isn't Laney's rank. General is Laney's first 
name. General Laney does, however, have a claim to fame, 
unrecognized though it may be.

Detroit resident General Laney is the founder and prime mover 
behind a little publicized organization known as the National Black 
Sportsman's Association, often referred to as "the black gun 
lobby." Laney pulls no punches when asked his opinion of gun 
control: "Gun control is really race control. People who embrace 
gun control are really racists in nature. All gun laws have been 
enacted to control certain classes of people, mainly black people, 
but the same laws used to control blacks are being used to disarm 
white people as well."

Laney is not the first to make this observation. Indeed, 
allied with sportsmen in vocal opposition to gun controls in the 
1960s were the militant Black Panthers. Panther Minister of 
Information, Eldridge Cleaver noted in 1968: "Some very interesting 
laws are being passed. They don't name me; they don't say, take the 
guns away from the niggers. They say that people will no longer be 
allowed to have (guns). They don't pass these rules and these 
regulations specifically for black people, they have to pass them 
in a way that will take in everybody."

Some white liberals have said essentially the same thing. 
Investigative reporter Robert Sherrill, himself no lover of guns, 
concluded in his book *The Saturday Night Special* that the object 
of the Gun Control Act of 1968 was black control rather than gun 
control. According to Sherrill, Congress was so panicked by the 
ghetto riots of 1967 and 1968 that it passed the act to "shut off 
weapons access to blacks, and since they (Congress) probably 
associated cheap guns with ghetto blacks and thought cheapness was 
peculiarly the characteristic of imported military surplus and the 
mail-order traffic, they decided to cut off these sources while 
leaving over-the-counter purchases open to the affluent." 
Congressional motivations may have been more complex than Sherrill 
suggests, but keeping blacks from acquiring guns was certainly a 
large part of that motivation. (Incidentally, the Senate has passed 
legislation that would repeal the more-onerous provisions of the 
1968 act. The bill faces an uncertain future in the House of 
Representatives.)

There is little doubt that the earliest gun controls in the 
United States were blatantly racist and elitist in their intent. 
San Francisco civil-liberties attorney Don B. Kates, Jr., an 
opponent of gun prohibitions with impeccable liberal credentials 
(he has been a clerk for radical lawyer William Kunstler, a civil 
rights activist in the South, and an Office of Economic Opportunity 
lawyer), describes early gun control efforts in his book 
*Restricting Handguns: The Liberal Skeptic Speak Out*. As Kates 
documents, prohibitions against the sale of cheap handguns 
originated in the post-Civil War South. Small pistols selling for 
as little as 50 or 60 cents became available in the 1870s and '80s, 
and since they could be afforded by recently emancipated blacks and 
poor whites (whom agrarian agitators of the time were encouraging 
to ally for economic and political purposes), these guns 
constituted a significant threat to a southern establishment 
interested in maintaining the traditional structure.

Consequently, Kates notes, in 1870 Tennessee banned "selling 
all but 'the Army and Navy model' handgun, i.e., the most expensive 
one, which was beyond the means of most blacks and laboring 
people." In 1881, Arkansas enacted an almost identical ban on the 
sale of cheap revolvers, while in 1902, South Carolina banned the 
sale of handguns to all but "sheriffs and their special deputies - 
i.e., company goons and the KKK." In 1893 and 1907, respectively, 
Alabama and Texas attempted to put handguns out of the reach of 
blacks and poor whites through "extremely heavy business and/or 
transactional taxes" on the sale of such weapons. In the other Deep 
South states, slavery-era bans on arms possession by blacks 
continued to be enforced by hook or by crook.

The cheap revolvers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries 
were referred to as "Suicide Specials," the "Saturday Night 
Special" label not becoming widespread until reformers and 
politicians took up the gun control cause during the 1960s. The 
source of this recent concern about cheap revolvers, as their new 
label suggests, has much in common with the concerns of the gunlaw 
initiators of the post-Civil War South. As B. Bruce-Briggs has 
written in the Public Interest, "It is difficult to escape the 
conclusion that the 'Saturday Night Special' is emphasized because 
it is cheap and is being sold to a particular class of people. The 
name is sufficient evidence - the reference is to 'niggertown 
Saturday night.'"

Those who argue that the concern about cheap handguns is 
justified because these guns are used in most crimes should take 
note of *Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime, and Violence in America*, 
by sociologists James D. Wright, Peter H. Rossi, and Kathleen Daly. 
The authors, who undertook an exhaustive, federally funded, 
critical review of gun issue research, found *no conclusive proof 
that cheap handguns are used in crime more often than expensive 
handguns*. (Interestingly, the makers of quality arms, trying to 
stifle competition, have sometimes supported bans on cheap handguns 
and on the importation of cheap military surplus weapons. Kates 
observes that the Gun Control Act of 1968, which banned mail-order 
gun sales and the importation of military surplus firearms, "was 
something domestic manufacturers had been impotently urging for 
decades.") But the evidence leads one to the conclusion that cheap 
handguns are considered threatening primarily because minorities 
and poor whites can afford them.

Attempts to regulate the possession of firearms began in the 
northern states during the early part of the 20th century, and 
although these regulations had a different focus from those that 
had been concocted in the South, they were no less racist and 
elitist in effect or intent. Rather than trying to keep handguns 
out of the price range that blacks and the poor could afford, New 
York's trend-setting Sullivan Law, enacted in 1911, required a 
police permit for legal possession of a handgun. This law made it 
possible for the police to screen applicants for permits to posses 
handguns, and while such a requirement may seem reasonable, it can 
and has been abused.

Members of groups not in favor with the political 
establishment or the police are automatically suspect and can 
easily be denied permits. For instance, when the Sullivan Law was 
enacted, southern and eastern European immigrants were considered 
racially inferior and religiously and ideologically suspect. (Many 
were Catholics or Jews, and a disproportionate number were 
anarchists or socialists.) Professor L. Kennett, coauthor of the 
authoritative history *The Gun in America*, has noted that the 
measure was designed to "strike hardest at the foreign-born 
element," particularly Italians. Southern and eastern European 
immigrants found it almost impossible to obtain gun permits.

Over the years, application of the Sullivan Law has become 
increasingly elitist as the police seldom grant handgun permits to 
any but the wealthy or the politically influential. A beautiful 
example of this hypocritical elitism is the fact that while the 
*New York Times* often editorializes against the private possession 
of handguns, the publisher of that newspaper, Arthur Ochs 
Sulzberger, has a hard-to-get permit to own and carry a handgun. 
Another such permit is held by the husband of Dr. Joyce Brothers, 
the pop psychologist who has claimed that firearms ownership is 
indicative of male sexual inadequacy.

Gun-control efforts through the centuries have been propelled 
by racist and elitist sentiments. Even though European aristocrats 
were members of a weapons-loving warrior caste, they did their best 
to keep the gun from becoming a weapon of war. It was certainly all 
right to kill with civilized weapons such as the sword, the battle 
ax, or the lance; these were weapons that the armored knights were 
trained to use and which gave them a tremendous advantage over 
commoners who didn't have the knights' training or possess their 
expensive weapons and armor. But guns, by virtue of being able to 
pierce armor, democratized warfare and made common soldiers more 
than a match for the armored and aristocratic knights, thereby 
threatening the existence of the feudal aristocracy.

As early as 1541, England enacted a law that limited legal 
possession of handguns and crossbows (weapons that were considered 
criminally dangerous) to those with incomes exceeding 100 pounds a 
year, though long-gun possession wasn't restricted - except for 
Catholics, a potentially rebellious minority after the English 
Reformation. Catholics couldn't legally keep militia-like weapons 
in their homes, as other Englishmen were encouraged to do, but they 
could legally possess defensive weapons - except, as Bill of Rights 
authority Joyce Lee Malcolm has noted in her essay "The Right to 
Keep and Bear Arms: The Common Law Tradition," during times "of 
extreme religious tension."

According to Malcolm, when William and Mary came to the 
English throne, they were presented with a list of rights, one of 
which was aimed at staving off any future attempt at arms 
confiscation - "all Protestant citizens had a right to keep arms 
for their defence." England then remained free of restrictive gun 
legislation until 1920 when, even though the crime rate was very 
low, concern about the rebellious Irish and various political 
radicals ushered in today's draconian gun laws. (Colin Greenwood, 
former superintendent of the West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police, 
has discovered in his research at Cambridge University that the 
English gun crime rate is significantly *higher* now than it was 
before that nation's strict gun laws were enacted.)

Alas, the European aristocracy wasn't able to control gun use, 
and at least in part, the spread of effective firearms helped to 
bring down aristocracy and feudalism. By contrast, in 17th-century 
Japan the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate was able to establish a rigidly 
stratified society that deemphasized the development of guns and 
restricted arms possession to a warrior aristocracy, the *samurai*. 
When Commodore Perry "reopened" Japan to the rest of the world, in 
the middle of the 19th century, few Japanese were familiar with 
guns (the sword was the most honored weapon of the samurai) and the 
most common guns were primitive matchlocks similar to those 
introduced to Japan by the Portuguese in the middle of the 16th 
century. As post-Perry Japan modernized and acquired a modern 
military, it also quickly developed modern weaponry. But a 
citizenry without a gun-owning tradition was easily kept in place 
in a collectivist society where individuals were more susceptible 
to formal and informal social controls than are westerners.

The preceding are just samples of the political uses to which 
gun controls have been put throughout the world. Nazi Germany, the 
Soviet Union, and South Africa are modern examples of repressive 
governments that use gun control as a means of social control. 
Raymond G. Kessler, a lawyer- sociologist who has provided some of 
the most sociologically sophisticated insights into the gun control 
issue, suggests in a *Law and Policy Quarterly* article that 
attempts to regulate the civilian possession of firearms have five 
political functions. They "(1) increase citizen reliance on 
government and tolerance of increased police powers and abuse; (2) 
help prevent opposition to the government; (3) facilitate 
repressive action by government and its allies; (4) lesson the 
pressure for major or radical reform; and (5) can be selectively 
enforced against those perceived to be a threat to government."

Of course, while many gun control proponents might acknowledge 
that such measures have been used in the ways Kessler lists, they 
would deny that the controls that they support are either racist 
or elitist, since they would apply to everybody and are aimed at 
reducing violence for everybody. Yet the controls that they 
advocate are in fact racist and elitist in *effect*, and only the 
naive or the dishonest can deny their elitist *intent*.

Kessler has also written that while liberals are likely to 
sympathize with the poor and minorities responsible for much of 
this nation's violent crime, when the are victimized themselves, 
"or when they hear of an especially heinous crime, liberals, like 
most people, feel anger and hostility toward the offender. The 
discomfort of having incompatible feelings can be alleviated by 
transferring the anger away from the offender to an inanimate 
object - the weapon."

A perfect example of this transference is provided by Pete 
Shields, the chairman of Handgun Control Inc., whose son was 
tragically murdered by one of San Francisco's Zebra killers - 
blacks who were killing whites at random in the early 1970s. This 
killing was carried out by a black man who was after whites - his 
own skin color and that of the victim were important to the killer 
- but in his grief, the white liberal father couldn't blame the 
criminal for this racist crime. So the gun was the culprit. The 
upshot is that we now have Handgun Control Inc., with its emphasis 
on the *weapon* used to commit a crime rather than the criminal. 
Yet blacks and minorities, who would be prevented from defending 
themselves, are likely to be harmed most by legislation proposed 
by Handgun Control Inc., the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, 
and other proponents of strict handgun controls.

Since the illegal possession of a handgun (or of any gun) is 
a crime that doesn't produce a victim and is unlikely to be reported 
to the police, handgun permit requirements or outright handgun 
prohibitions aren't easily enforced. And as civil liberties 
attorney Kates has observed, when laws are difficult to enforce, 
"enforcement becomes progressively more haphazard until at last the 
laws are used only against those who are unpopular with the 
police." Of course minorities, especially minorities who don't 
"know their place," aren't likely to be popular with the police, 
and these very minorities, in the face of police indifference or 
perhaps even antagonism, may be the most inclined to look to guns 
for protection - guns that they can't acquire legally and that 
place them in jeopardy if possessed illegally. While the intent of 
such laws may not be racist, their effect most certainly is.

Today's gun-control battle, like those of days gone by, 
largely breaks down along class lines. Though there are exceptions 
to the rule, the most dedicated and vociferous proponents of strict 
gun controls are urban, upper-middle-class or aspiring upper-
middle-class, pro-big-government liberals, many of whom are part 
of the New Class (establishment intellectuals and the media), and 
most of whom know nothing about guns and the wide range of 
legitimate uses to which they are regularly put to use. Many of 
these elitists make no secret of their disdain for gun-owners. For 
instance, Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York recently dismissed those who 
are opposed to the Empire State's mandatory seat-belt law as "NRA 
hunters who drink beer, don't vote, and lie to their wives about 
where they were all weekend."

On the other hand, the most dedicated opponents of gun control 
are often rural- or small-town-oriented, working- or middle-class 
men and women, few of whom possess the means to publicize their 
views, but many of whom know a great deal about the safe and lawful 
uses of guns. To these Americans, guns mean freedom, security, and 
wholesome recreation. The battle over gun controls, therefore, has 
come about as affluent America has attempted to impose its anti-
gun prejudices on a working-class America that is comfortable with 
guns (including handguns), seldom misuses them (most gun crime is 
urban), and sees them as protection against criminal threats and 
government oppression.

How right you are, General Laney.  "All gun laws have been 
enacted to control certain classes of people...."

-- William R. Tonso is a professor of sociology at the 
University of Evansville and the author of Gun and Society.

-- Reprinted, with permission, from the December 1985 issue 
of REASON magazine. Copyright (c) 1985 by the Reason Foundation, 
2716 Ocean Park Blvd., Suite 1062, Santa Monica, CA 90405. Not to 
be printed for circulation without permission. 

 

GUN CONTROL AND AMERICAN BLACKS

 by Raymond G. Kessler (pp. 476-478)

 In the United States, the experience of blacks from slavery 
through the 1960's was one of the clearest and best-documented 
examples of the political functions of gun control.

 Seventeenth Through Early twentieth Centuries

 In his study of slave revolts, Aptheker concludes that a 
ruling class, often subjected to periods of crisis arising from the 
doubt of its ability to maintain its power, may be expected to 
develop complex and thorough systems of control.[89] America's 
slaveocracy developed a number of methods of suppression and 
oppression: one of these methods was gun control.[90] In fact, the 
first recorded legislation concerning blacks in Virginia (1640) 
excluded them from owning guns. [91] Throughout the South, intense 
fear of slave revolts resulted in additional legislation, which 
included provisions further restricting the access of slaves to 
firearms.[92] The political functions of these laws were often 
indicated in their titles, for example, "An Act for the better 
preventing of Insurrections by Negroes." [93] In 1850 an Alabama 
legislator recognized the political functions of gun control when 
he attempted to minimize fears of the slave population by pointing 
out that slaves were disarmed, unaccustomed to the use of arms, and 
thus could be easily suppressed.[94]

 Slave rebellions frightened the ruling class into granting 
concessions, such as the establishment of minimum legal protections 
for slaves.[95] Had the slaves not been restricted in their access 
to firearms, their actual and potential revolts might have been 
even more devastating, and even greater concessions might have been 
obtained.

 At the close of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass was 
concerned that legislatures in the South still had the power to 
pass laws discriminating against blacks and predicted that, in 
addition to other disabilities, the freedmen would be restricted 
in their access to firearms.[96] Immediately after the war, 
provisional governments set up militia organizations that excluded 
former slaves and were used to disarm the freedmen.[97] Later, 
however, radical state governments in some Southern states were 
able to abolish the provisional militia and set up Negro 
militias.[98] Eventually, however, abandoned by the national 
government and subjected to violent attack and intimidation, as 
well as some legitimate politicking, the black militias and radical 
governments succumbed.[90] One contemporary observer stated, "It 
is no longer with them [anti-Reconstruction forces] the number of 
votes but the number of guns."[100] When white supremacists 
captured the legislatures, they confirmed Douglass' fears.

 The use of firearms by blacks had "social and political 
implications," and among laws designed to maintain what Southern 
legislators "considered due subordination of the freedmen" were 
prohibitions against Negroes handling firearms.[101] For blacks, 
firearms had been both a symbol and means of keeping their freedom 
and political power; they were also instruments of suppression by 
whites seeking to reestablish the old order. In the end, whites 
triumphed and blacks were effectively disarmed.[102] Since they 
were forbidden to possess firearms, blacks "were rendered 
defenseless against assault,' and in "parts of the country remote 
from observation, the violence and cruelty engendered by Slavery 
found free scope for exercise upon the defenseless Negro."[103] 
Public officials "stood by while murders, beatings, and lynchings 
were openly perpetrated."[104] From the 1870's until well into this 
century, the handgun laws of "Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, 
Missouri, and Texas deprived the victims of the means of self-
defense, cloaking the specially deputized Klansmen in the safety 
of their monopoly of arms." [105]

Excerpts from Kessler's "Political Functions of Gun Control"

(pop. 479-485)

 >From "The Black Panthers"}

 As we move to more recent times, when the nation makes some 
attempt to solve the "American Dilemma" and open racism becomes 
less socially acceptable, the political functions of gun control 
with regards to blacks become less clear. Some hypotheses are 
examined briefly below.

....

Vice president Agnew called the Panthers "a completely 
irresponsible, anarchistic group of criminals": Assistant Attorney 
general Leonard concluded that the Panthers were "nothing but 
hoodlums and we've got to get them"; FBI Director Hoover stated 
that the Panthers "without question represent the greatest threat 
to internal security of the country [among] violence-prone black 
extremist groups"; and Attorney General Mitchell ruled that the 
Panthers were threat to national security and thus subject to FBI 
wiretapping.[108]

 A number of observers concluded that at least some of the 
government activity against the Panthers was not justified by 
legitimate law enforcement concerns and was aimed at destroying the 
Panthers as a political force.[109]

....

The BPP was formed in Oakland in 1966, and by 1967 a bill was 
introduced in the California legislature to prohibit the carrying 
of loaded weapons within incorporated areas of the state. The bill- 
later enacted- was, in fact, an anti-Panther bill instigated by the 
Oakland police and given impetus by the appearance of numerous 
armed Panthers in Contra Costa county.[115] 

 >From "Federal Gun Laws"

}...

Sherrill points out that in the 1960's, white America became 
concerned about the "black problem."... The high index crime rates 
for blacks caused concern, and the intelligence of blacks was 
openly questioned.[131]

....

After the 1967 riot in Plainsfield, New Jersey, Governor 
Hughes ordered a warrantless search of black areas by the National 
Guard to find forty-six carbines allegedly stolen from a nearby 
arms factory. No carbines were found, but many residences were left 
in shambles.[134] 

....

In reaction to this domestic crisis, Congress panicked and 
passed the Gun Control Act of 1968- a law they hoped would close 
the routes by which blacks were getting guns.[137] Congress assumed 
that ghetto blacks were getting cheap imported military surplus and 
mail order guns and thus decided to cut off these sources while 
leaving over-the-counter acquisition open to the affluent. 
Although the Gun Control Act came shortly after the murders of 
Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Act did nothing 
about the types of guns used in those assassinations. Sherrill thus 
concludes that the law was directed against "that other threat of 
the 1960's more omnipresent than the political assassin- namely the 
black rioter."[138] In sum, Sherrill's thesis is, quite simply, 
that the Act was passed not to control guns but to control 
blacks.[139]

 >From "The Civil Obedience Act of 1968"

....Section (a) (2) of the Civil Obedience act of 1968 provides 
criminal penalties for "Whoever transports or manufactures for 
transportation in commerce of any firearm, or explosive or 
incendiary device knowing or having reason to know that the same 
will be used unlawfully in furtherance of a civil disorder..." 
[140]

 The Act was offered on the Senate floor by conservative 
democrat Russell Long of Louisiana as an amendment to the Civil 
Rights Act of 1968.[141] In the senator's remarks and articles he 
placed in the record there is frequent mention of riots and black 
militant leaders H. Rap brown and Stokely Carmichael, and 
references to "open revolt," "violent and bloody revolution," 
"aggressive guerilla warfare," and the stockpiling of arms for use 
in next summer's riots.[142]

....

Although there was at the time some exaggeration of the use 
of firearms by and the political consciousness of rioters, as well 
as of the potential for black revolt, those perceptions helped 
secure reform beneficial to blacks (e.g., the Fair Housing 
Provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1968) as well as new criminal 
laws such as the Civil Obedience Act.

 If Sherrill's thesis and the above analysis are correct, the 
parallel with the slaveowners' response to slave revolts is 
striking. In both cases, more firearms control follows outbreaks 
of violence by blacks. The difference is, of course, that by the 
1960's, gun laws directed only at blacks would have been held 
unconstitutional and would have damaged the nation's image abroad. 
There can be little doubt, however, that all concerned knew quite 
well that the rioters and snipers were overwhelmingly black.

 Black crime, rioting, and revolutionary movements indicate 
problems in the black community and white-dominated society that 
certain vested interests would prefer to ignore. If this crime, 
rioting, and threats of revolt can be minimized by gun control 
without the necessity of major reform beneficial to blacks, it is 
a victory for those who have an interest in the political and 
economic status quo. If the black population is armed and 
potentially volatile, it cannot be ignored as it was for so many 
years. Such a population places tremendous pressure on government 
to grant beneficial reforms and can defend itself against white 
vigilantes as it did in the South in the 1960'.[144]

-- 
Greg Booth BSc                          />_________________________________
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