‘Progressives’ Join Bloomberg in Challenging Fitness of Blacks to Own Guns

By David Codrea

USA –  -(Ammoland.com)- “These horrifying new numbers show how America’s lax gun laws hurt black Americans,” a Violence Policy Center-inspired screed against gun rights on Vox claims.

“[T]he black homicide rate … was 16.91 per 100,000 people. In comparison, the overall national homicide rate was 4.27 per 100,000 and the white homicide rate was 2.54 per 100,000. This includes all homicides, not just gun deaths.”

Why not break it down further? And what’s with white homicide rates being lower than those of many countries that have enacted restrictive “gun controls”?

That would seem to indicate that the issue isn’t “lax gun laws,” at all, as the majority segment of the population behaves remarkably peaceably around all those guns. The implication is what Michael Bloomberg articulated a few years back, when he advocated for cities to enact special race-based disarmament edicts aimed at “minority” males up to age 25.

Curiously, the usual payoff-seeking race hustlers didn’t make a public squall over that, and the media, generally quick to vent outrage when “progressive” sacred cows are questioned, conveniently kept a lid on things for Bloomberg. Vox doesn’t make the same miscalculation here – their premise seems to be since some people can’t be trusted with guns, none of us can be.

The transition from pockets of predation to making sweeping indictments against the Republic as a whole can be seen in the lame attempt to compare U.S. gun ownership rates against gun-related deaths around the world. Now all of a sudden it’s in their interests to add segregated whites back into the mix.

The first bit of conflation is the use of the word “ownership,” both a legal and a moral concept. Criminals don’t “own” property obtained through violent or thieving actions, and there can be a world of usage differences between things that are owned and things that are possessed.

The other trick is to use a manipulated term like “developed” or “industrialized” to exclude from the discussion countries that don’t support a premise.  Note the chart (and the video) Vox uses to make its case.  Anybody see Russia or Mexico listed, both with more restrictive gun laws and higher violent crime than the U.S.?

Whether one consults the UN, the IMF, the World Bank or the CIA Factbook, Mexico has a larger GDP than many of the nations that qualify as “developed” when it suits gun-grabber purposes. Also rated above many countries in term of “economic complexity,” Mexico includes cars, computers, video displays and delivery trucks among its top exports. It boasts a literacy rate of 93.4 percent.

And somebody had better tell Vladimir Putin that Third World jerkwater he rules over has no business exporting rocket engines to the U.S. While they’re at it, they should let Gabby Gifford’s brother-in-law Scott Kelly know he just spent the last year risking his life in orbit with a pair of crude, Vodka-swilling peasants.

In fairness, Vox offers some “progressive” (Opposite Day) alternatives if Americans won’t listen to them and their VPC talking point providers on guns. For starters, they want to resurrect forms of alcohol prohibition (and stimulate the bootleg market!) with higher taxes, fewer points of legal sale, and Orwellian monitoring of “prohibited persons.”

They want a permanent police occupation in high minority areas. They want to force more participation in indoctrination programs. They want even more dependency on government housing, paid for by productive members of society who are somehow able to cope with “lax gun laws” all the while resisting the urge to victimize others.

In short, like typical control freak “progressives” they want to ratchet up government control of all aspects of life and ignore the incontrovertible evidence that they’re just piling more of the same destructive interference and subsidization of poor choices that has led to today’s inexcusable state of affairs.

Look at where the homicide is the highest. They’re Democrat-controlled Bloomberg coalition zones.

It’s ultimately not a racism issue. Civil rights/EEO laws have been around for the lifetime of most of the population. Barack Obama was elected with millions of white voters coming together to affirm their belief that race should not matter – and yet it seems the country is reaching new levels of polarization, as those with collectivist agendas gin up and exploit hostilities.

It’s not about “poverty,” despite that excuse being so universally unchallenged.  Look at the multitude of municipal, country, state and federal welfare programs and then look back to when there was true widespread poverty and virtually no comprehensive safety nets, as in the Great Depression. Sure, there were public works programs then, but nothing as comprehensive as today, and the operative word was “work.” Many of our parents and grandparents managed to emerge from that with their values, ethics and esteem for personal responsibility, hard work and education intact. And they did it without “free” phones, housing, utilities, nutrition programs, EBT cards, medical care, child care, internet service and $200 athletic shoes.

By the way – everybody who doesn’t know how babies are made, raise your hand. That’s enabled, too.

It’s not lack of funding for urban education, either. But fat cat union officials, bloated public school administrators and social indoctrination engineers who flush away billions are also part of the Democrat/”progressive” machine. The young minds who, in spite of that, emerge from the other end of that mill with mastery of the basics (and some even who manage to excel) do so through individual achievement and family expectations and standards, not because of collectivist central planning bureaucrats.

That Vox is pushing a statist subjugation agenda instead of any true solutions is hardly a surprise. Like all “progressive” endeavors, the obsession is to control everything, including what its readers should think about the news.

A truism some don’t like, but are still unable to refute, is that anyone who can’t be trusted with a gun can’t be trusted without a custodian. Alternatively, those who do not commit intolerable (victimizing) acts are entitled to the birthrights of free people. Skin color has nothing to do with that – conduct does.

Curiously, the ones who, have the biggest problem with the uninfringed right of the people to keep and bear arms, the ones who object the loudest to true power sharing, are the same ones passing themselves off as egalitarians. Unsurprisingly – and to show how “regressive” those who would impose their rules on the rest of us truly are – the “solutions” they offer reject freedom, and trace back to the “racist roots of gun control.”

About David Codrea:

David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating / defending the RKBA and a long-time gun rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament.

He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” and also posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.