Strict gun laws are bad for blacks: Why African-Americans should value Second Amendment protections

Strict gun laws are bad for blacks: Why African-Americans should value Second Amendment protections

By Marc Lamont Hill

Wednesday, November 17th 2010, 4:00 AM

As expected, the midterm elections produced huge victories for the GOP and the Tea Party. Still, there was an even bigger winner in the recent drubbing of the Democratic Party: the pro-gun movement. The House of Representatives, which has always had a strong bipartisan pro-gun majority, added nearly 20 pro-gun votes.

As a black progressive, I am tempted to echo the sentiments of most liberals, who regard this pro-gun turn as a full-fledged civic crisis. For most of them, gun ownership is an expendable rather than inalienable right, one worth ceding in exchange for a more peaceful society.

While I understand this position, the price of the ticket, at least for black people, is simply too high.

We live in a nation founded on revolutionary violence and held together, at least in its tumultuous first century, through violent practices. The Second Amendment gives citizens the right to keep and bear arms not only to safeguard their homes and property but to stave off the possibility, albeit remote, of a tyrannical government.

In other words, our democracy in its founding document protects citizens' right to guard themselves from danger. For blacks, who have repeatedly been left unprotected by the government, this right should be viewed as a nonnegotiable component of citizenship.

It's little-known that throughout its history, the United States government has gone to great lengths to disarm black people - from early "slave codes" that prohibited blacks from possessing firearms to exorbitant postwar gun tariffs that priced blacks out of the gun market.

As a result, blacks were rendered especially vulnerable. Hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan would probably have been far less effective if blacks had the same access to guns as the white citizens under hoods. The threat remains today - though the culprit is not white men under hoods but crime perpetrators of all colors.

Today's gun control laws may be racially neutral on their face, but they have a clear and disproportionate impact on poor communities of color, which are often left defenseless against predators in their own backyards.

Over the past 20 years, many states and cities have imposed gun laws that allow police and other state agencies to determine which individuals are worthy of gun ownership.

Consistently, blacks are overrepresented among the "unworthy," despite being statistically more likely to confront random violence. Gun bans against public housing residents, supposedly designed to prevent violent crime, have served to disarm poor blacks almost exclusively.

Such laws prompted Otis McDonald, a 76-year-old black Chicago resident, to successfully sue the City of Chicago to affirm his right to defend himself. The suit went all the way to the Supreme Court, which correctly affirmed his constitutional right to self-defense.

Hopefully, this decision will spark similar pushback around the country. Indeed, the New York Police Department is already lowering the financial barriers for gun possession in the home out of a fear that the courts could strike down its current policies.

Gun violence is a plague, and reasonable gun control makes perfect sense. We must support laws that ban gun show sales, straw purchases, interstate gun trafficking and other loopholes that enable handguns to get into the hands of criminals. And I find no good reason to allow private citizens to buy weapons of mass destruction that have no sporting or self-defense purpose - or to let felons or mentally ill people get hold of firearms.

But while it would be naive to suggest that guns will solve the problem of urban violence, it would be equally shortsighted to ignore the dangers of further disarming the people who need the most help.

Hill is an associate professor of education and anthropology at Teachers College, Columbia University, and host of "Our World With Black Enterprise," which airs Sundays at 1 PM on ABC-7.


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Strict gun laws are bad for blacks: Why African-Americans should value Second Amendment protections.