Jim Crow Rides Again

(This article originally appeared at jpfo.org and is reprinted here with permission.)

By Neil Smith

Less than a hundred years ago, there were laws in many states and localities — not just southern ones, by any means — maliciously written, passed, and enforced for no other reason than to make living just as difficult as it could be for black people, and to make voting, traveling, and doing everyday business in any normal manner all but impossible. Such restrictions were popularly known as “Jim Crow” laws, named for yet another ugly epithet that white bigots reserved for black people. Where I went to high school, for example, there was a nearby town with official signs at the city limits warning black people — in the rudest imaginable terms — not to be there once the sun had gone down . . .

In 1961, an extraordinarily courageous white journalist named John Howard Griffin, had his skin color medically altered and made other cosmetic changes for several weeks, in order to experience the way ordinary black people were forced to live. The simple acts of moving from one city to another, complying with the segregationist policies of bus companies, of trying to find a place to eat, or a decent place to sleep became nightmarishly complicated — if you happened to be black. For some, America was the land of the free and the home of the brave. For others, it was more like living in a bad movie about Nazi Germany.

Griffin wrote a series of magazine articles about what he’d seen and done, later combining them into an amazing book called Black Like Me, which finally became a movie with James Whitmore. As a budding libertarian, there were aspects of the left wing civil rights movement I didn’t like and openly opposed, but the idea that some Americans could be routinely treated the way Griffin described made my blood boil, and deepened my natural loathing for the authority that made it possible.

Rex Stout has overweight, agoraphobic detective Nero Wolfe tell a group of black men who have come to consult with him that had he been born black in such circumstances, he would be in prison, by now, or dead.

Today, Jim Crow laws are making a comeback, and they aren’t just for black people any more. In many cases the same individuals — or their children — who once played a large and commendable part in ending this form of tyranny based on the color of a person’s skin, are now revealed to harbor prejudices of their own, which they are energetically and enthusiastically imposing on others they perceive as their moral and social inferiors. And it doesn’t look any better on them than it did on fat white southern sheriffs wearing mirrored sunglasses.

Understand that, for some long-range planners in what might be called the victim disarmament industry, anti-gun laws have strategic significance.They are opening bids in a worldwide effort, hammered out by environmental fascists and eugenics fanatics, mostly under the auspices of the United Nations, to disarm and enslave entire peoples, and to engineer a new Holocaust, reducing the Earth’s human population by 90 percent, to what they believe is lovely Mother Gaia’s “carrying capacity”. It’s very hard to do that to people who are adequately armed.

For others, though, the new Jim Crow laws are being passed merely as harassment, designed to make life difficult, if not impossible, for members of an American culture of freedom and independence that the self-appointed elite have always hated, loathed, and despised — and seen themselves at war with. They know that none of these laws will have any effect on crime. They are intent on committing cultural genocide.

Yet the 14th Amendment was passed expressly so black people would be free to exercise the unalienable individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to obtain, own, and carry weapons. In the name of racial equality, then, if nothing else, I demand the same right for myself.

Charles Schumer, Harry Reid, Barack Obama, Caroline McCarthy, John Hickenlooper, Diane Feinstein, Rahm Emanuel, Diana DeGette, Michael Bloomberg, Joseph Biden: every one of these tax-fattened parasites, and the rest of their ilk might as well be wearing bed-sheets and burning crosses on the lawns of Productive Class gun-owners across the land. They can always count on the “embedded” media to help with the lynchings.

Like the bigots they are, professional gun-grabbers continue to stereotype gun owners as ignorant, impoverished rednecks, when every survey shows we are racially and ethnically mixed, better-educated, and more profitably employed than the average American. If I had a nickel for every doctor I’ve met at the shooting range, or every PhD I know who owns and uses guns, or every black or Asian individual I’ve seen enjoying gun shows, I wouldn’t have to worry about collecting royalties.

Any early 20th century bigot could give you plenty of reasons — entirely unsupported by real data or logic — why black people (or the Chinese, Jews, or Catholics) were lacking in intelligence and moral character, and were not to be trusted, but must be denied basic freedoms the bigots themselves enjoyed. New York City’s Sullivan Act was passed by Irish politicians (who themselves had been discriminated against only a generation earlier) to keep Italians from obtaining guns.

Today’s anti-gunners, mostly “progressive” Democrats, imagine that everybody else shares their larcenous nature and infantile lack of impulse-control. They are extremely violent by nature (as they have demonstrated on countless occasions like the so-called “Million Mom March”), can’t trust themselves or their children with the means of self-defense, and assume everyone else is as untrustworthy as they are.To avoid being identified as the sick, twisted bigots that they are, they attempt to force the focus onto inanimate objects, rather than on the people whom they’re attempting to strip of the means of self-defense.

They demonize handguns they say are too small or too inexpensive (depriving poor people of the means of self-defense), identifying them as “Saturday Night Specials”, originally a very nasty racist insult.

They demonize modern high-capacity magazines which can defend an individual man or woman — and their family — from an entire gang of thugs.

They demonize semiautomatic weapons as if they were some new, diabolical development, but which were marketed more than a century ago.

They demonize trivial features of a weapon, like its shape, color, or the material it’s made from, or the presence of a pistol grip or bayonet lug which reflect certain historical interests and aesthetic preferences, and have nothing whatever to do with the operation of the firearm.

They demonize certain “assault rifle” cartridges, ignorantly characterizing them as being especially powerful, when they are, in fact, far less powerful than many of the most common deer hunting cartridges.

They demonize the standard military rifle of the nation, carried by hundreds of thousands of young soldiers, and adapted to civilian use.

At the same time, they and their pet media adamantly refuse to acknowledge the historic fact that the Second Amendment — and the weapons it sanctions — was written, above all, to protect the country from stupid, evil, irrational, power-hungry monsters exactly like them.

Perhaps the victim-disarmers have forgotten that the American Revolution began with a British attempt to confiscate the firearms and ammunition of a people they mistakenly regarded as subjects, but whom frontier life had hardened into tough, self-reliant, sovereign individuals. Perhaps the same brilliant “strategists” who told them that Iraq and Afghanistan would be a “cake-walk” are telling them now that the descendents of these pioneers will be just as easy to overcome.

Every member of the victim disarmament conspiracy must be made to understand clearly that he or she will eventually and inevitably be punished — under due process of law — for the crime of endangering “the security of a free state” which clearly constitutes an act of treason.

Equally, we must get America out of the U.N. and the U.N. out of America. This is an organization openly dedicated to the suppression of individual rights and to mass-murder on an absolutely unprecedented scale.

We must be resolved — and we must demand the same resolve from the Republicans and the NRA — not to be satisfied merely with fending off this or that newly-proposed law, as we have been over the past several decades. That’s the “strategy”, both cowardly and stupid, that brought us to the ugly mess we find ourselves in now. The entire structure of federal, state, and local gun law must be obliterated. That’s what the Constitution mandates; we must be content with nothing less.

Award-winning author and lecturer L. Neil Smith, a fifty-year veteran of the American freedom movement, has written over 30 liberty-oriented books. He is the publisher and senior columnist of The Libertarian Enterprise, now in its 17th year online. He is also Senior Editorial Consultant to Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.
Visit the Neil Smith archive on JPFO.