Laugh a minute Ann Coulter weighed in on Trayvon Martin, Stand Your Ground Laws and the NRA on Friday’s The O’Reilly Factor. Her take is that it’s not the shooting or the Stand Your Ground Laws that are racist, it’s gun control laws. Her contention is that gun control laws are about the “Democratic Ku Klux Klan” keeping guns out of the hands of black people.
COULTER: “If what a certain network I could name, not Fox (MSNBC) is claiming happened, that George Zimmerman stalked this young black child just because he was black, shot him dead, in cold blood, if that’s the case, the reaction isn’t the conclusion they’re coming to on the left, which is ‘Oh, we need more gun control.’ Gun control laws have been used historically to keep guns out of the hands of blacks. It was the Republican party and the NRA that has always supported arming blacks in order to protect themselves from the Democratic Ku Klux Klan. ”
O’REILLY: “So what you’re saying is, ‘If MSNBC News’ hypothesis is true, that this was a racially bias driven murder, that all African-Americans should take that as a warning sign and arm themselves against happening to them. They should support the NRA. They should support a law that allows you to fight back if threatened and they should arm themselves.’”
COULTER: “Yes, And the reason I thought of it is because liberals are leaping to exactly the opposite conclusion that, ‘Oh, we have to get rid of these Stand Your Ground laws.’ They’re against easy issuing of concealed carry permits. As well as I point out in my column, Martin Luther King Jr., a Christian minister under constant death threats, applied for a gun permit after his house was fire bombed and the Alabama authorities, under the discretionary gun permit law, said, ‘No. No, this Christian minister is not suitable for a gun permit.’ That’s how discretionary permits work. People who are for gun control are trying to keep guns out of the hands of the powerless.”
O’REILLY: “It’s interesting that you cite Martin Luther King, Jr., because the reason he was denied a gun permit is because he was black. That was the only reason. If he had been a white preacher and his house was firebombed, they would have had the national guard with bazookas protecting him, but because he was down in the south where there was racial discrimination in every area, he was denied the gun permit and you say that now, African-Americans should now understand that if what Al Sharpton and the other guys are saying is true, that they are targets of white racists and those people are coming to get them, the only protection they have is to arm themselves.
COULTER: “Yes, and gun control laws have always been used this way. This is the history of gun control on these shores. The very first gun control law ever enacted on these shores was in 1660, all it did was say that blacks, both slaves and free men, were not allowed to be armed. That was the battle that Republicans were fighting against Democrats, first through the Civil War but then in the wake of the Civil War, you had free black American citizens and they had a right to be armed and among the rights they were being denied by Democrats, not Republicans in the south. The history books will often try and twist the history by referring to the KKK and the racist as Southerners. Oh, no, no, no. The Republicans in the South weren’t discriminatory.
O’REILLY: “Some of them were.”
COULTER (Ignoring O’Reilly): “And by the way, some of the Democrats up north were voting against the Civil Rights Act. The one thing all of the discriminators and the KKK sympathizers — or KKK themselves — had in common was they were all Democrats and they would use things like gun registration to find out which blacks had guns so that the KKK could go in and take them away or sometimes just informers who would be given those guns or the ‘May Issue’ which we still have on some books today, where the authorities determine whether you’re suitable to have a gun, and they’d look at you and if you’re black, you’re not suitable, and if you’re white you’re suitable.”
Here’s the video:
Ann Coulter is not a stupid woman. She has enough knowledge of pre-Civil Rights Era history to twist an argument. Yes, the first gun control laws were discriminatory. Yes, the southern Democratic party was racist during that era, but what Coulter and Republicans often fail to mention is that the majority of racists left the party after a southern Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act. From that point on, the Republican party became the party of institutionalized racism.
I know that Coulter is trying to shock us into saying, “oh, no, that can’t happen,” but when she says that the natural progression of Stand Your Ground laws should be that African-Americans arm themselves, my reaction is that she’s probably right.
An entirely armed populace would level the playing field, at least until the very moment a bullet lands. That’s when the legal system steps in. Justice, unfortunately, is anything but blind.
Here are some facts:
- When committing the same crimes, black people are arrested more often than white people.
- When going to court, black people are convicted more often than white people.
- Black people are more likely to be excluded from jury service.
- Black people receive longer sentences.
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