Trayvon Martin and the Second Amendment

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Since the shooting of Sanford, Florida teenager Trayvon Martin at the end of February, the United States is going through one of its regular episodes of national hand-wringing about race relations.

On the racial angle to this, the Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates is, as he always is on these sorts of matters, worth a read. The reaction to the shooting from various quarters has rehashed so many themes from the history of race in America, and has even drawn in President Obama and his Republican challengers. There is one aspect of the affair which needs to be better covered, however, and that is the use of this tragedy to push a particular line about the role of guns in American life.

In the opening scenes of Bowling for Columbine, film-maker Michael Moore uttered one of the most contemptible slanders I have ever heard. He mentioned the coincidence of the National Rifle Association and the Ku Klux Klan being founded in the same year (1871), and with a Fox News-style dog-whistle, he left viewers with the impression that the two events were somehow connected. In fact, the NRA was founded in the North, and among its early leaders was President Ulysses S. Grant (the recipient of the overwhelming majority of black and abolitionist votes in the 1868 and 1872 presidential election, and the man who signed the Ku Klux Klan Act into law). Meanwhile, the Black Codes introduced by Redeemer governments in the South usually proscribed gun ownership by African-Americans, among other denials of civil liberties. The breaches of the Second Amendment by Southern states did not go unnoticed in the North, and were among the factors which assisted the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. (The Second Amendment, however, was not incorporated to the states until 2007.)

The push for gutting the Second Amendment has flared up many times. In the late 1960s, it was Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, no friend of African-Americans, who testified before a congressional committee and called for all guns to be banned. When Bobby Kennedy brought up gun control on the campaign trail in 1968, his opponent Gene McCarthy thought he was playing the race card (at the time, mentioning gun control was a faux pas among liberals, as any talk of private citizens needing protection against lawlessness was seen as pandering to the white ‘backlash’ against civil rights). At some point between then and now, American liberals have done an about-turn, and now promote an interpretation of the constitution which nullifies the Second Amendment, or reduces its scope to apply only to weapons in use in 1791 (a standard which would exclude electronic forms of media from the First Amendment).

The change was probably cemented by the 1994 passage of the Brady Bill, a landmark piece of federal gun control (I prefer the term ‘victim disarmament’) legislation. The scares in the 1990s about the doings of right-libertarian or white supremacist militias (which reached its apogee with the Oklahoma City bombing of 1996) caused liberals to engage in the same fear-mongering about ‘National Security!!!11!’ that they (correctly) accuse conservatives of deploying. This phenomenon has resurfaced again during the Obama administration – liberals were quick to capitalise on the 2009 suicide of a census worker in Kentucky (who had the word ‘FED’ scrawled on his body, and whose death at first looked like a lynching) and the Gabrielle Giffords shooting to expound a narrative of America being threatened by violent anti-government activities.

Even before the investigation into the death of Trayvon Martin has concluded, the Brady Campaign, which pushed for the Brady Bill’s passage, is at it again. They are presenting a petition to Congress which derides the defence of the Second Amendment as the “extremist, political agenda of the gun lobby.” They talk about keeping guns out of the hands of “dangerous people”, but seek to equally disarm non-dangerous people defending themselves from ‘dangerous people’. They also overlook that Trayvon Martin wasn’t shot by a random member of the public, but the sole volunteer of a state-sanctioned neighbourhood watch association who had a history of working with the authorities to apprehend suspects. In other words, Zimmerman was in a sort of grey area between being a private citizen and an agent of the state.

In summary, there is nothing progressive about gun control, which in practice equates to leaving African-Americans (and other racial minorities) to the mercy of city police departments with records of racial profiling, police brutality, and disproportionate searches of their vehicles, and which has a history of being used by tyrannical majorities to disarm unpopular minorities.