One issue on everyone's mind this Martin Luther King Jr. day was gun control. King's calls for resolving our differences through peaceful nonviolence are especially poignant after Jared Loughner gunned down six people and wounded several others in Tucson. Amid the clamor for new gun laws, its appropriate to remember King's complicated history with guns.
Most people think King would be the last person to own a gun. Yet in the mid-1950s, as the civil rights movement heated up, King kept firearms for self-protection. In fact, he even applied for a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
A recipient of constant death threats, King had armed supporters take turns guarding his home and family. He had good reason to fear that the Klan in Alabama was targeting him for assassination.
William Worthy, a journalist who covered the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, reported that once, during a visit to King's parsonage, he went to sit down on an armchair in the living room and, to his surprise, almost sat on a loaded gun. Glenn Smiley, an adviser to King, described King's home as "an arsenal."
As I found researching my new book, Gunfight, in 1956, after King's house was bombed, King applied for a concealed carry permit in Alabama. The local police had discretion to determine who was a suitable person to carry firearms. King, a clergyman whose life was threatened daily, surely met the requirements of the law, but he was rejected nevertheless. At the time, the police used any wiggle room in the law to discriminate against African Americans.
Ironically, the concealed carry permit law in Alabama was promoted by the National Rifle Association thirty years earlier. Today, the gun rights hardliners fight to eliminate permits for concealed carry, as Arizona has done.
Eventually, King gave up any hope of armed self-defense and embraced nonviolence more completely. Others in the civil rights movement, however, embraced the gun.
One of the most indelible images of the 1960s is a photograph from Life magazine of Malcolm X looking out a window with a long M-1 carbine in his hands, the rifle pointed up to the sky. For blacks unhappy with the progress achieved by King's marches, the gun became a symbol of the "by any means necessary" philosophy.
The Black Panthers took Malcolm X's approach to the extreme, openly carrying guns as they patrolled for police abuses on the streets of Oakland. They even made guns part of their official uniform, along with the black beret and leather jacket. Every member learned about Marxism and firearms safety.
California passed a law to disarm the Panthers and then Congress, after King was assassinated by James Early Ray, passed the Gun Control Act of 1968 -- the first major federal gun control since the 1930s. These laws fueled the rise of the modern gun rights movement, which self-consciously borrowed tactics from the civil rights movement.
One lesson the gun advocates took was from the early King and his more aggressive followers: If the police can't (or won't) to protect you, a gun may be your last line of defense. Inspired by that idea, the gun lobby has grown so strong that even after the Tucson mass murder there is almost no likelihood of new gun laws being passed.
Whether a broader acceptance of the King's later pacifism would have made us safer than choosing guns, we will never know.
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There was no concealed carry law prior to that. It was illegal. The NRA never intended the law to be applied with racial discrimination. Remember that the NRA was founded by Union generals, armed blacks who were being threatened by the KKK, and many prominent NRA members supported MLK.
I myself have been a victim of this kind of discrimination, having been turned down for a concealed carry permit for being a latino, or as the Sheriff said, "a damn greaser". This despite the fact that as an active duty member of the military I was probably everybit if not more qualified to carry a firearm than he was.
This is why the NRA has struggled to get these local discretion permit laws replaced with shall issue policies.
— Mahatma Gandhi, "Gandhi, An Autobiography", page 446
‘‘In a polity, each citizen is to possess his own arms, which are not supplied or owned by the state.’’
— Aristotle
It's worth noting that the reason why such laws were passed, not only in the South, but in places such as New York and California, giving the local authorities to issue or not issue concealed weapons licenses, was specifically so that cases such as Dr. King's could be dealt with as his was. Since blatantly racist language, such as "Blacks may not have licenses" wouldn't stand up to a court challenge, the "may issue" laws became popular as a means of allowing minorities and immigrants to be denied what whites were freely given. New York's Sullivan Law was designed to disarm Italian and Jewish immigrants, and California's law was meant to to do the same to Chinese and Mexican immigrants, as well as African Americans. While all the Jim Crow gun laws of the South have been repealed, it's interesting that those of liberal bastions like California, New York, Boston, and Chicago still stand.
By the way, the reason why gun control isn't any more popular after the Tucson shooting is because, as even the National Academy of Sciences has stated, after reviewing all available research on the subject, there is not one single legitimate study showing that gun control does anything at all to reduce violent crime.
King also was a strong supporter of gun control, writing the following after JFK's assassination:
"By...our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim; by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing...we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes.”
The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., Edited by Clayborne Carson, Grand Central Publishing, 1998, pp. 81-82
It's worthy of note that all the people he mentioned that had guns were also killed by guns and those killed were no safer by possessing guns
It's not a contradiction that men and women of peace would feel a need for armed protection. It is the way of the world that peaceful messengers are so often slain. The threats against Dr King were real. And Dr King's concern for his protection and his family's safety were based in reality.
Many of the arguments opposing gun control are not based in reality. The arguments that the government is coming in black helicopters to take away the guns is based in conspiracy theories. The argument that a gun is the last line of defense is oftentimes based in fear and paranoia.
In light of the recent SCOTUS decision, that the Second Amendment confers an individual and not a collective right, I would think that "sensible" gun control laws are in fact infringements, on Second
Amendment rights. And if progressives truly believe in a "living Constitution", then the present day "assault weapons", are the modern day equivalent of the muzzle loader, used by the Minutemen during the American Revolution. As such, they are the very weapons the Founders would have wanted protected for citizen ownership.
Our Constitution is about checks and balances. An armed citizenry was to act as a check and balance against and armed government.
An article about MLK espousing defensive handgun use generates 9 comments.
Self defense hasn't changed in the last 50 years.
What about the Civil War, the New York Draft Riots, the LA/Rodney King Riots, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the Ludlow Massacre...?
Or is the definition of “shocking” purely dependent upon partisan bias?