Welcome To The Club!

There's a "gotcha" gambit that people who aren't adept at reasoned discourse resort to when they feel trapped by an argument. They'll often resort to personalizing an argument, as in "I bet you wouldn't like it if..."

As if they cannot fathom that you might be able to elevate principle over personal preference, or be willing to tolerate someone engaging in behavior you yourself don't like or wouldn't do.

That's not the worst part of that gambit, though. It often includes derogatory implications.

One I've heard time and again, to the point of having a stock response, is "how would you feel if black people started buying guns?" in response to my strong Second Amendment advocacy.

Make that two stock responses.

My first, which ignores the implicit "you're a racist" accusation, is "I'd welcome them to the club, and talk guns with them all day."

Which has happened. I took a two day driving class outside Las Vegas a couple years ago. There was one black guy in the class of seventeen, and somehow during the breaks we figured out that we were both 2A advocates and gun owners. So, the rest of the time, we talked guns, and his experience in Texas vs mine in NY. Also worth a mention here is the Youtube channel of Colion Noir, a prolific and very well informed 2A advocate who also happens to be black.

My second, saved for when someone is being really overt, is to point out how racist such a question is, and ask why they fear black people exercising their rights.

The "how would you feel..." trope occurred to me when I read this bit about how "LGBTQ liberals" have started buying guns as precaution against the (absurd and baseless) fear that they are going to be rounded up into concentration camps* by or under the Trump administration.

Your and my first reaction to that fear is likely to be, "Oh for ****s sake!," but I think that's best kept to ourselves. The better, public reaction would be "good for you! That's what the Second Amendment is about, and welcome to the correct side of history!"

Because, indeed, that is what the Second Amendment is about. It is the last bulwark against government tyranny, "necessary to the security of a free State." It gives all the other ones teeth.

So, yes, even if the specific fear is baseless, I'm totally on-board with "LGBTQ liberals" arming themselves. They would join members of many other identity groups that are presumed, nay, expected (by the Left) to be anti-gun simply because of their other political views. They might be surprised (and perhaps pleased) to find out that there's a quarter-century old movement/organization called the Pink Pistols (logo at the top of this piece) that is exactly what you think it is and whose motto is "Pick on someone your own caliber."

Blacks, and especially black women, are the fastest-growing gun ownership population in America. Their reasons appear to trend more toward self-defense than anti-tyranny, but reason doesn't matter. There is no "justification" qualifier in the Second Amendment, no matter that a handful of states imposed one until the Supreme Court's Bruen decision affirmed its unconstitutionality.

I also knew and knew of several formerly anti-gun Jews who at least pondered arming themselves after 10/7, and I said "welcome to the club!" back then. In fact, I will say that to anyone not individually debarred from gun ownership (by such things as felony convictions) without prejudice, and I fiercely reject any implication that I as a gun rights advocate would be fearful of anyone who wants to "join the club" because of race or ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation... or height or weight or car preference or veganism or fondness for yacht rock.

A regular reader recently commented on "a very odd type of racism within the "highly educated" circles" toward working class brown people. I imagine the same sort of elitist bigotry is at the heart of "I bet you wouldn't like it if blacks or gays started buying guns" straw men - straw men that reek of psychological projection.

The Left talks about big tents, about gathering a "diversity" of identity groups under the Democratic banner, but it is blatantly obvious that their affinity for those groups is in their votes, not their interests. I'm in favor of a "big tent" that has individual rights as its unifier. Your demographics and identity markers don't matter to me, just your prioritizing liberty. Come on in, there's plenty of room!

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*The “concentration camp” trope is bipartisan and persistent. As I recently blogged, the Right has had its versions. The only actual example in modern American history, however, is the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, an utterly disgraceful action (by progressive hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt) that was endorsed by the utterly disgraceful Korematsu Supreme Court decision, and that took until 1988 to redress (by progressive anathema Ronald Reagan).

This seems an apt moment to quote Justice Frank Murphy’s dissent in Korematsu.

I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must, accordingly, be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment, and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.

Given what I just wrote about the rise of opposition to legal immigration within the GOP, Murphy’s reminder that “[a]ll residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land” is apt and remains timely.