CONTROL WHAT?
NOT GUNS!
By Glayde Whitney
The following essay appeared in the March, 2000 issue of Citizens Informer.
It is reprinted at SecondAmendment.net
with permission of the author.
“We are in a strange state when you can insult someone by
accusing him of having told the truth - which he then strenuously denies”
Jared Taylor, July 1996.
During the first week of March there was a great brouhaha raised by liberals, led by their front-person, William Jefferson Clinton: Gun locks, licensing of gun owners, background checks for all sales at gunshows, move toward outlawing all guns, and more of the same.
What caused this latest outbreak of anti-gun hysteria? Two more perps used handguns to kill innocents. One in small town Michigan. A six year old Black boy who already had a record of violence and stabbing against fellow students took a stolen handgun to elementary school to shoot dead a little White girl with whom he had argued the previous day. He stood on her desk and spit on her. He said he hated them all.
One almost never hears of children killing children. This is because normal children of long-civilized races have inborn inhibitions against causing severe bodily harm to other children.
A colleague, a Clinical Psychologist, commented:
"I'm really surprised
by the amount of sympathy gushing forth for this
reckless
cold-blooded murderer. Sure, he's 6 years old, but tell me he
had no
understanding of what he was doing. Also, tell me he won't hurt
any more
children. He's extremely low on empathy. Even two-year-olds
know better
than to hurt people with sharpened pencils. I don't know how
well he
understood guns, but he knew enough to conceal it when he brought
it to school,
and to fire a single shot on his first attempt with only one
bullet
in the pistol.
“Kids don't harm each
other with weapons and sharpened pencils because they
are born
with a natural sense that it is terribly wrong to do that to
someone.
This kid doesn't have that kind of sense. He is a huge menace,
and if
they don't start watching him extremely closely, he's going to kill
someone
else. That is my prediction. It might not happen for a decade or
two, but
I'm sticking with that prediction. He's a natural-born killer!”
The second perp in the same week was an adult Black male in suburban Pittsburgh. He went on a killing spree - against Whites. He is reported to have said:
"I'm not gonna hurt any Black people, I'm gonna kill all White people."
He killed two
White men and critically wounded three others in a bloody rampage.
The dead were identified as 71-year-old Joseph Healy
of Wilkinsburg and John Kroll, 55, of Cabot, Pennsylvania. Hospital officials
said the death toll could rise with three others in critical condition
(and it did). Authorities said all five shooting victims were White men.
Wilkinsburg Mayor Wilbert Young told Reuters that the suspect had warned the manager of his apartment building not to send White repairmen to his home. The mayor also said that two repairmen -- one White and one Black -- had gone to Taylor's home but that Taylor had only shot the White man.
A Black woman who lived near Taylor told CNN that Taylor walked into her apartment before the shootings and told her: "Well, I'm not gonna hurt any Black people, I'm gonna kill all White people," she said.
Taylor holed up in a day-care center. He released the Black nurses and seniors, but held the Whites at gunpoint. He asked the whites which one wanted his last bullet.
Pray tell, what do these two cases have in common? Why, guns killing people of course, the liberals are screaming.
However, scholars at University of Chicago and at Florida State University have published books [John R. Lott, Jr. More Guns, Less Crime University of Chicago Press, 1998; Gary Kleck Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America.Aldine de Gruyter, 1991] that reveal that more guns in the hands of civilians lead to fewer crimes.
The solution to this apparent contradiction is a taboo concept: Race.
Normal white people, descendants of hundreds of generations of civilized peoples, framers of the Magna Carta, inventors of modern firearms, are not dangerous to their fellow citizens when armed. If anything, an armed White populace contributes to an increase in polite civility. For example, Lilly-white Vermont has never outlawed the carrying of concealed handguns, and has one of the lowest rates of homicide (3.3 per 100,000 in 1977, according to FBI data). So too North Dakota (0.9 per 100,000).
Individuals of East Asian descent are similarly from a long-civilized race and in the U.S. have an even lower rate of violent gun crime than do Whites.
On the other hand, Washington DC outlawed all handguns long ago, and has remained one of the most dangerous places in America. (Homicide rate: 27 per 100,000). What differentiates Vermont from Washington DC? Of course the answer is obvious, but taboo.
In 1995, I pointed out in a presidential address to the Behavior Genetics Association that the best predictor of murder rate across the 50 states of the U.S., and across the 170 cities in the U.S. that had a population of at least 100,000 was simply the proportion of the population that was Black.
The problem of Blacks led to the first gun control laws in the United States, and continues to fuel the fires today.
In 1973/74 California there was a series of murders that became known as the Zebra Killings. Black Muslims who wanted to become members of the elite Death Angel brotherhood had to kill enough Whites to qualify (there was a point system in place). Random Whites were stabbed, bludgeoned, tortured, dismembered alive, slashed, raped, and shot to death. One of the Whites who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time was twenty-three year old Nelson T. Shields IV. What might a loving liberal father do when his namesake is killed at random by a Black “offing” Blue Eyed Devils simply because they are White? And the killings are by just about every lethal implement imaginable, from meat cleaver to machete to gun. In grief for his son, Nelson T. (Pete) Shields III founded Handgun Control, Inc.
In early settlement and along the frontier, gun ownership was essentially unrestricted, and contributed to a general civility. The wild gun-slinging image of the West is largely the creation of penny-westerns written in the East. Indeed, the Gunfight at the OK Corral is justly famous because it represents such a rare event. When the post-Civil War James’ Gang visited Northfield Minnesota, they experienced the perils of an armed citizenry.
But riotous and impulsive Blacks were always a problem. The French Black Code (1751) required Louisiana colonists to stop and, "if necessary," beat "any black carrying any potential weapon ...” Some of the very first gun control laws were passed by Southern legislatures to restrict the use of firearms by freed Blacks. The Supreme Court of North Carolina decided in 1844 that this type of law did not violate the Second Amendment.
Conditions
grew serious in the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction South. A
crime wave by lawless Blacks led to the formation of
vigilance committees, such as the original Ku Klux Klan, which were joined
by most White community leaders -ministers, bankers, judges, shopkeepers,
schoolteachers. Conditions then were not unlike those in today’s South
Africa, and the response of decent citizens is the same in both times and
places. Eventually the Blacks of the South were effectively disarmed and
pacified to the extent possible.
The major gun control acts at the federal level are the laws of 1934, 1938, and 1968. The 1934 National Firearms Act was a response to many factors, including the earlier mass immigration of culturally different radicals, prohibition bootlegging, and Depression-Era bank robbers. The Act required registration and invoked interstate commerce to enact what were then exorbitant taxes on the possession and transfer of certain restricted weapons - fully automatic machine guns, sawed-off shotguns and rifles, and silencers.
The Federal Firearms Act (1938) attempted to restrict and control gun distribution thorough a series of measures such as federal licensing of gun dealers, serial numbers required on guns, and so-forth. Interestingly, concern over foreign subversion was widespread at this time. In addition to the U.S., major gun restriction laws were enacted in Great Britain (1937), Germany (1938), and France (1939).
Two major laws in 1968 revoked the 1938 FFA and replaced it with a wide variety of new restrictions (no mail order sales, no import of certain foreign guns, etc.). It also led to great dissention and an eventual “revolt” among the membership of the National Rifle Association (NRA). For the first time in many years the NRA had not only failed to block anti-gun legislation, it had actually supported or been silent. The problem for the NRA was that by this time overt mention of Black violence had become forbidden.
Publicly, the 1968 laws were passed in reaction to political assassinations (Two Kennedys and a King) and increased street crime. Privately though, there was a different problem, according to some investigative reporters. Black riots were destroying the cities of America. Radical groups such as the Black Panthers were openly preaching race war, and massive amounts of mail-order guns were being delivered to unknown persons at ghetto addresses. In order to shut the spigot, the NRA leadership went along with gun restrictions in 1968. But by that time Orwellian doublespeak had become so firmly entrenched, racial equality the lie of the land, that the NRA could not admit the reason why.
Pandering to political correctness, the NRA continues to experience difficulties as it pretends to not be aware of the Elephant at the table.
For example, anti-gun propagandists made a great deal of a study that compared homicides in gun-lenient Seattle WA with those in gun-restrictive Vancouver BC, just across the border in the people’s republic of Canada. The homicide rate was higher in Seattle; therefore guns were the cause and should be restricted.
However, Dr. Edgar A. Suter pointed out in the Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia (March 1994) that Seattle had a lot of Blacks and Hispanics compared to Vancouver which had a lot of Whites and Orientals. Blacks wherever they are have a higher homicide rate. Suter found that among Whites, the homicide rate was actually lower in Seattle. The study actually revealed not a gun problem, but the Black problem. But be very careful how and when and where you acknowledge this -it is not Politically Correct.
The quote at the top of this paper is relevant here. Dr. Paul Blackman, a researcher with the NRA, publicly mentioned the well-established truth that there are ethnic differences in homicide rates, and that when these are taken into account the case against guns crumbles. The Washington Post attacked the NRA for maintaining a “racist” position, which the NRA then denied. We are indeed “ in a strange state when you can insult someone by accusing him of having told the truth - which he then strenuously denies”.
As Whites continue to be inconvenienced, restricted, and put at peril, because of the violent criminality of Blacks, one cannot help but be reminded of the opinion of the drafter of our Declaration of Independence:
“Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” -- Thomas Jefferson.
=====================================================
Glayde Whitney is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Florida
State University. He may be reached at whitney@Darwin.psy.fsu.edu.