Gun-control advocates have long argued that trained police and military, but not civilians, have cause to be armed. We’ve been told that owning a gun is a dangerous fetish — not to mention useless in the face of a state armed with tanks and thermonuclear weapons. A civilized society relies on law-enforcement officers to safeguard the peace, not a bunch of unregulated slack-jawed yahoos. Even the notion of a constitutional right to individual self-defense is, they claim, a fraud perpetrated by the gun lobby and its collaborators.
The same people now inform us that cops are shock troops deployed by a systemically racist state to suppress African Americans. So much so that the public should contemplate abolishing, defunding, or “reimagining” law enforcement altogether. We frequently hear progressives hyperbolically assert that black Americans are being “hunted down” in the streets by nefarious cops. When the New York Times published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton in which he proposed that the president “employ the military,” if necessary, to protect city neighborhoods from rioters and looters, dozens of the paper’s staffers acted as if the words themselves were violence, tweeting, “This puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.”
So the question is: Why have liberals spent years demanding that we arm racist killer cops and disarm innocent black civilians? Why do they believe white supremacists should have guns but not shopkeepers?
– David Harsanyi in The Riots and Protests Will Make Gun Ownership More Popular