Guns and Racism

The Supreme Court's recent decision in NYSRPA v Bruen, wherein the 'may-issue' doctrine regarding concealed carry permits was found to violate the Second and Fourteenth Amendments, has quite predictably stirred up a hornet's nest of wasp-chewing harridans on the Left. New York (state and city) leaders have already openly avowed to defy the spirit of the Court's ruling to as great an extent as possible, because, we are told, New York City is so uniquely different from the rest of the nation that the rules that apply to 75% of Americans (including the residents of Miami, Dallas, Phoenix, Houston, and Atlanta (five of the ten largest metro areas)) would be disastrous in the nation's biggest city.

While the Bruen case wasn't about New York City's notorious Sullivan law, written in 1911, the ruling plainly declared it unconstitutional.

Cue the sturm und drang.

And the irony.

We were simultaneously told that a 233 year old Amendment was too antiquated, but that a 111 year old local law was so established as to be unchallengeable.

That the Second Amendment was birthed of the highest principles of liberty and individualism, whil the Sullivan Law was written with Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants (and blacks, as a "bonus"), is of no matter to those who consider individuals' rights a problem rather than a feature of our nation.

Indeed, one of the dirty secrets of progressivism is the racist origin of some of its most cherished policies.

There is a sense of cosmic justice in Clarence Thomas delivering the Bruen decision. Thomas has been the most vocal about the Court's reluctance to build upon the landmark Heller and McDonald decisions that finally affirmed the Second Amendment as an individual right, publicly scolding the Court for failing to provide clear guidance as to what restrictions and infringements governments could impose. Thomas has been a staunch gun-rights advocate across his tenure. Thomas turned 74 the day the decision was released, giving a birthday gift not only to himself, but to 329 million Americans.

Thomas, being the only black on the Court, also embodies a rejection of the racism that birthed gun control laws.

And he knows it.

From his decision:

Even before the Civil War commenced in 1861, this Court indirectly affirmed the importance of the right to keep and bear arms in public. Writing for the Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393 (1857), Chief Justice Taney offered what he thought was a parade of horribles that would result from recognizing that free blacks were citizens of the United States. If blacks were citizens, Taney fretted, they would be entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, including the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Id., at 417 (emphasis added). Thus, even Chief Justice Taney recognized (albeit unenthusiastically in the case of blacks) that public carry was a component of the right to keep and bear arms—a right free blacks were often denied in antebellum America.

After the Civil War, of course, the exercise of this fundamental right by freed slaves was systematically thwarted. This Court has already recounted some of the Southern abuses violating blacks’ right to keep and bear arms. See McDonald, 561 U. S., at 771 (noting the “systematic efforts” made to disarm blacks); id., at 845–847 (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment); see also S. Exec. Doc. No. 43, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., 8 (1866) (“Pistols, old muskets, and shotguns were taken away from [freed slaves] as such weapons would be wrested from the hands of lunatics”).

Thomas goes on. Read more in the decision itself, starting at Page 53.

Justice Roger B. Taney, the author of the notorious Dred Scott decision, recognized 165 years ago that 2A was an individual right, and that "carry" actually meant "carry." He could have argued otherwise in his efforts to deny blacks citizenship, but the Second Amendment is so plain that only a modern leftist intellectual has the mental elasticity to contort around it.

Before the Civil War, there were "Slave Codes" in the South that prohibited blacks from owning guns. Those were wiped out by the War and subsequent federal legislation, but they reemerged as "Black Codes." Across the decades, such discriminatory infringement of the gun rights of blacks proliferated. More on that here.

Fast forward to the Bruen decision, which drew an unusually large number (over 80) of amicus briefs. Among those were supports for the challengers (i.e. groups that favored overturning New York’s ‘may-issue’ doctrine) from:

• The Black Attorneys of Legal Aid

• The Bronx Defenders

• Brooklyn Defender Services

• Italo-American Jurists

• The African-American Gun Association

• Black Guns Matter

These groups argued that New York's "proper-cause" requirement was exercised in a discriminatory fashion, i.e. members of minority and marginalized groups were more frequently denied gun licenses than the norm. One brief notes:

For our clients, New York’s licensing regime renders the Second Amendment a legal fiction.

Another observes:

Today, the “proper cause” requirement under § 400.00(2)(f) affords licensing officials the same unbridled discretion that led to the discriminatory treatment of New York’s immigrant population under the original Sullivan Law. This requirement is “so broad, undefined, and devoid of any objective standards that [it] pose[s] no obstacle to granting or withholding licenses in a highly discriminatory, prejudicial, arbitrary, or political manner.”

“Indisputably, for much of American history, gun-control measures, like many other laws, were used to oppress African Americans.”

The Jim Crow era, wherein governments wrote and enforced discriminatory laws, was awash in more of the same.

The racist roots of gun control are obvious and irrefutable. For the progressive Left to sky-scream so wildly about the Court applying to 25% of the nation the rules under which 75% already live, and call it "reckless" and many other pejoratives, makes farce of their endless tub-thumping about systemic racism.

Want to see genuine, legit, according-to-Hoyle systemic racism? That perpetrated by government on citizens? Look across the many decades of anti-black gun control laws. Look at the practical results of New York's licensing system, past and present. Look at the advocacy groups pointing out the inequities and injustice of a system wherein a government stooge gets to decide who deserves to exercise rights protected by the Constitution. Look at the minority communities plagued by crime, with no recourse, and subject to the "catch-and-release" apathy of the ivory tower elites who have no qualms about being personally protected by civilians with guns while everyone else goes defenseless.

Want to be anti-racist? Want to correct a couple centuries of injustice and systemic discrimination? Want to offer reparations to the mistreated? Get on board with the premise of individual gun rights for all law-abiding citizens, a premise already embraced in 43 states, and tell those caterwauling fear-mongers in New York's (and other blue states') government to stow their hypocrisy, cease their faux outrage (they all saw this coming), and stand true to the oaths of office wherein they swore to defend the Constitution.

And tell them not to twist, squirm, stall, and otherwise delay implementation of Justice Thomas’s ruling.

A footnote. If you’re among those who enjoy following informed YouTube personalities, I recommend Colion Noir. He’s been a staunch gun rights advocate and exposer of the racism behind gun control.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.