Image from "Advice for avoiding Stop and Frisk" blog post at Raid My Words.

On Saturday, May 12, several hundred people rallied in front of the New York City Police Department headquarters to protest the NYPD’s “Stop and Frisk” program, considered by many to be a prime example of modern-day, institutional racism. But with approximately 40,000 officers and a nearly $5 billion annual budget, the NYPD is the largest police force in the U.S. and, some say, the most powerful on earth. So how does one try to change an ongoing policy enforced by such an entrenched institution? According to some activists at the rally, the way to begin is twofold: by educating people about their rights during police searches and by mounting a community effort to do surveillance on the NYPD.

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What do you call a law that allows a person to shoot and kill another human being when they could otherwise walk away safely?

I can only call it immoral.

With George Zimmerman soon headed to a pre-trial hearing to evaluate whether he will be protected by the “Stand Your Ground” law in Florida, it is important to understand exactly how the law has made permissible the use of lethal force and legalized acts of murder that previously never would have been deemed “justifiable homicides.”

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We had a big birthday bash for my step-daughter a few weeks ago. It was great: a big gaggle of kids, music, pancakes, a rainbow cake and lots of balloons. I appointed myself balloon maven and—armed with a how-to guide from the Klutz series and a hand pump—handed out wonderful balloon hats to the youngsters.

They were a hit. But I had not studied my guide very carefully, and once they started clamoring for dog and cat and dragon balloon animals, I was deeply out of my element.

“A wand, what about a magic wand?” I improvised with the first little boy who asked for a dog balloon. I whipped it up quick and handed it to him with a Harry Potteresque flourish. “There, now you can do magic.”

“Cool,” he replied, “a sword!” and he dashed off to engage his little brother.

Soon all the kids were crowded around my knees demanding (politely) swords in all the colors of the rainbows. “I will make you a magic wand,” I insisted to each, manipulating the top of the long balloons into fanciful wand like shapes. “Okay, but I am going to turn it into a sword,” they said again and again, undoing my handiwork at the top of the wands and swashbuckling their ways across the church hall. It went on like this all morning. The only child I could get to request a magic wand was my very own Rosena, and even she used it like a sword the minute it was in her little hands.

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Recently, Conservatives have been making broad accusations that the Occupy Wall Street movement is “anti-Semitic,” despite no real evidence to indicate this is true.  Understandably, many of the Occupy protesters—including Jewish ones—are outraged.  To them, I can only say, “I know how you feel.”

I’ve worked in the gun violence prevention field now for 11 years.  In September of last year, I published a blog at Waging Nonviolence that debunked an argument that has become fashionable in right wing circles—namely, that gun control is “racist.”  Not long ago, you would have had to search the darkest recesses of the pro-gun movement to find anyone making this claim. But following the Supreme Court’s split ruling in McDonald v. Chicago—in which the Citizens United wing of the Court agreed with an African-American plaintiff that Chicago’s handgun ban was unconstitutional—it became all the rage.

While some moderate political commentators have flirted with the smear, the folks who are really pushing it are those you’d expect:  the Washington Times, the National Review, self-employed pro-gun bloggers, etc.  Which is why I was quite disturbed when I saw UCLA Law Professor Adam Winkler embrace the “gun control is racist” charge in his brand new book Gunfight.

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Those of us who work in the gun control movement understand as well as anyone why a push for nonviolence is desperately needed in the United States. Two incidents that occurred within the span of a week last month reminded me of how ingrained—and absurd—the culture of violence is in our country.

On December 9, I traveled to MSNBC’s studios in Washington, D.C. to appear on “NewsNation with Tamron Hall.” I was scheduled to comment on two new National Rifle Association (NRA) lawsuits in Texas. One lawsuit challenges a 42-year-old federal law that bars handgun sales to those under the age of 21 by federally licensed dealers. The other targets a 15-year-old Texas law that prohibits those under the age of 21 from carrying concealed handguns in public.

The NRA’s 18-year-old plaintiff in these cases, James D’Cruz, has made headlines by posting a series of violent and disturbing comments on his Facebook page over the past three years. Here’s a sampling of his musings, which bring to mind such infamous figures as Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, as well as Viriginia Tech gunman Seung Hui-Cho:

There is no redemption, There is no forgiveness. I will stare into your eyes as I pull the trigger and laugh as you hit the ground with your last, pathetic breath.

im bored…ill light someone on fire

an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, thats why I take their heads.

Anyway, I walk into the MSNBC waiting room that day, and immediately see breaking news on their television screens. NewsNation was providing live coverage from Escondido, California, where law enforcement authorities were burning down a house that contained the largest stockpile of explosives ever found in a private dwelling (which made it too dangerous to enter and clear out by hand). It is unclear why the home’s owner, George Jakubec, was stockpiling high explosives, bomb-making materials, handmade grenades, guns, and ammunition. He is also suspected of robbing three San Diego banks.

After a few minutes, I was walked into a private studio, put in front of a camera, and even had a mike clipped on my suit jacket—but the images of this startling fire were just too good to resist. A voice in my earpiece told me they would not have time to air my segment. Could I come back some other time?

The irony of being preempted by a bomb maker as I was preparing to talk about a potential school shooter was not lost on me.

The following week, things got even stranger. I was called by the CBS affiliate in Pittsburgh (KDKA) to appear on NewsRadio 1020 with conservative host Mike Pintek. Mike wanted to talk about four shootings that had recently occurred in Western Pennsylvania.

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• Around 200 people protested in the center of Moscow on Sunday to demand a halt to attacks on Russian journalists and activists after a string of assaults on reporters.

• Several hundred protesters gathered near the Gorleben nuclear waste storage facility in northern Germany on Sunday to demonstrate against plans to extend the period the site can be used as a storage site.

• Thousands of people demonstrated in Madrid on Saturday against Morocco’s recent crackdown in Western Sahara.

• About 500 university students from throughout Louisiana descended on the capitol in Baton Rouge on November 10 to demonstrate against cuts in state spending on education.

• Parents, educators and civil rights advocates held a demonstration on the steps of Manhattan’s Tweed Courthouse on Sunday against Cathie Black becoming the mayor’s replacement for schools chancellor, saying that the publishing executive lacks proper experience in the educational field.

• A coalition of local faith and community groups in District Heights, Maryland gathered near a gun dealer on Saturday to pray for him and call for him to abide by a 10-point code of conduct for responsible firearms sales. Police have traced more than 2,500 guns used in crimes in the past 18 years back to this one dealer.

• Work at a coal loading rail depot in Scotland was disrupted by environmental campaigners last week after they attached themselves to the conveyor belt and the front gate to protest open cast mining.

• Some 2,000 people in the Agusan del Sur province of the Philippines rallied on Saturday for an end to illegal mining and illegal cutting of trees.

Prior to this summer, you would have had to explore the darkest corners of the gun rights movement to find anyone openly exclaiming that “gun control is racist.”  This assertion—and the corollary allegation that the civil rights movement succeeded not because of disciplined nonviolence, but because African Americans were willing to take up arms against their oppressors—emanated mostly from obscure right-wing and libertarian websites like LizMichael.com or The Campaign for Liberty.  The most-cited proponent was Clayton Cramer, a software engineer with a not-so-subtle agenda (that paved the way for Rand Paul), who has written that:  “Racism is so intimately tied to the history of gun control in America that we should…require that the courts use the same demanding standards when reviewing the constitutionality of a gun control law, that they would use with respect to a law that discriminated based on race.”

“The Only Black”
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 ruling in McDonald v. Chicago, however, the “gun control is racist” argument is all the rage.  The June 28 decision overturned Chicago’s longstanding handgun ban and ruled that the Second Amendment applies to the states.  The lead plaintiff in the case, Otis McDonald, is a 76 year-old African-American who wants a handgun for self-defense.  “I would like to have a handgun so I could keep it right by my bed, just in case somebody might want to come in my house,” McDonald explained.  The problem is that criminals never visit McDonald when he is home—loaded shotguns have been stolen from his home on multiple occasions while he was away.  McDonald might have bought those shotguns to protect himself and his family, but they ended up on the street in criminal hands and might have been used to intimidate, injure or kill innocent people.

McDonald has long been a gun rights activist in Illinois, traveling to rallies in Springfield, Illinois, where he was “probably the only black person.”  When attorney Alan Gura selected him as the lead plaintiff in the case, he inquired, “Why would you name [the case] after me?  Is it just because I’m the only black [plaintiff]?”

Nonetheless, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority in McDonald, imagined many other African-Americans in our nation’s history standing with the aged pro-gunner.  Specifically, Alito concluded that Reconstruction-era efforts designed to grant equal citizenship to black Americans were equally as much about gun rights as they were about civil rights.  He found a general right to bear arms within the “Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866,” a law that guaranteed blacks property ownership rights they were denied as slaves and created a federal agency to secure housing, establish schools, and litigate discriminatory policies for freedmen.  Alito also reasoned that the Fourteenth Amendment contemplated guns rights because the amendment was based on the “Civil Rights Act of 1866,” which used some of the same language as the “Freedmen’s Bureau Act” (but which Alito himself admits did not specifically mention any right to keep and bear arms).  Citing Congressional debate over the Fourteenth Amendment, Alito made reference to the following remark by Republican Senator Samuel Pomeroy from Kansas:

Every man….should have the right to bear arms for the defense of himself and family and his homestead.  And if the cabin door of the freedman is broken open and the intruder enters for purposes as vile as were known to slavery, then should a well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the polluted wretch to another world, where his wretchedness will forever remain complete.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote his own concurring opinion, noted that blacks were disarmed by state legislatures and denied protection from white mobs:

The use of firearms for self-defense was often the only way black citizens could protect themselves from mob violence.  As Eli Cooper, one target of such violence, is said to have explained, ‘[t]he Negro has been run over for 50 years, but it must stop now, and pistols and shotguns are the only weapons to stop a mob.’

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Normally, when I debate representatives from the National Rifle Association (NRA), hostile questions from the audience come from those with a decidedly Libertarian bent to their politics.  Typically, these individuals advocate for broader latitude on the part of Americans to respond to criminals with loaded firearms and lethal force.

I was therefore taken aback—and pleasantly surprised—to have my credentials as a practitioner of non-violence called into question during a debate with the NRA’s Outreach Director in late February of this year.

The audience was not our typical group of American college students.  This time, our debate was occurring in front of a group of British high school students visiting Washington.  Specifically, these were 16-19 year-olds from Shrewsbury Sixth Form College and Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College in Darlington.

When the Q&A eventually began, their professor/chaperone stated outright that my opponent would likely be getting most of the questions, and encouraged the students to save some for me.  Still, I was caught quite off-guard when a young man stood up and asked me if I thought it was appropriate to shoot an intruder in my home.  It was clear from his tone that he did not think it was appropriate.

I told him that I’d likely never find out, because I do not keep a firearm in my home and would never consider doing so—particularly given the fact that my wife and I now have children.  That said, I added, I have no problem with another American citizen keeping a firearm in his/her home for self-defense and using it if absolutely necessary.  The NRA’s outreach director then chimed in and said he was happy to hear me say that.  He, of course, had zero problems with blowing a home intruder away.

Another young Brit who was sitting in the audience that day later summed up the students’ reaction in a blog:

We were surprised to hear that Ladd Everitt of [the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence] saw shooting intruders in his home as an acceptable option … I’m not unrealistic, and I know that people’s instincts are to protect themselves and their loved ones.  But when a weapon is introduced, the situation is more likely to become fatal—something [he] told us in [his] talk.  I think the worry for me personally was that people would become judge, jury and executioner in these situations.  While I agree that it is fair to protect yourself, I don’t agree that you can unnecessarily injure or kill someone.  This becomes a whole lot easier when guns are involved, and that is why we see groups like [his] as so important.

As I headed home after the debate that day, I felt a strange combination of emotions:  Disappointment in myself that I had somehow let these students down, and excitement (and even inspiration) regarding their attitudes toward nonviolence.  Being an American, I was stunned.  You see, here we embrace “justified violence” from sea to shining sea, whether it’s the guy in Georgia who wants to carry a loaded handgun into an airport or the Hollywood producer behind “Shoot ‘Em Up.”

I wondered why these British students embraced the principles of nonviolence so readily and confidently.  In all my years speaking to American students, I’d never seen anything like it.  Is it simply because—whatever their concerns about self-defense—they understand that the gun death rate is 30 times lower in their country than in the United States?  [I mean, let’s face it, if an armed society was a polite society, the U.S. wouldn’t have higher homicide and gun death rates than virtually every other industrialized democracy on the planet.]

Or is it something more?  Don’t these kids play the same video games, watch the same movies (think “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”) and listen to the same music that our kids do?

I can’t claim that I’ve quite sorted it all out yet, but I will say that the experience filled me with a profound sense of hope that is still resonating with me now, months later.

• Thousands of people formed a human chain in Okinawa, Japan yesterday to protest the movement of a US military base there.

• 500 Afghan villagers demonstrated outside their governor’s office on Friday to protest a recent US-backed raid that killed civilians.

• Thousands of villagers in India facing displacement by steel giant POSCO are staging sit-in protests during what they have dubbed “resistance week,” which lasts through May 21.

• Communications worker union members marched through Johannesburg, South Africa demanding wage increases.

• Women vendors in Nagamapal, India staged a sit-in yesterday to protest continued price hikes. The sit-in condemned a government official’s visit to the region and shops and businesses were also closed in protest

• 160 Russian tractor factory workers have begun a hunger strike after not being paid for five months. They are also fundraising for a plane ticket for President Medvedev to come and mediate.

• A gay pride parade meant to protest rights violations against sexual minorities was violently disrupted by police in Belarus on Saturday.

• People gathered in the Maldives last week, clad in red shirts, to protest rising electricity tariffs.

• Saturday was International Day of Protest for Lolita’s Retirement, in support of an orca whale at Miami’s Seaquarium, who lives in the smallest whale tank in North America and possibly the world.

• Gun control activists protested outside an NRA conference in Charlotte, NC, saying discussion of gun violence was missing from the conference.

Professor Colman McCarthy, the Founder and Director of the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington, D.C. once commented that, “The most revolutionary thing anybody can do is to raise good, honest and generous children who will question the answers of people who say the answer is violence.”

I was reminded of his words a few weeks back.  I was sitting in my dining room, talking to my friend Jeremy and his family about my work at the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence.  We were discussing the gun lobby’s current campaign to allow individuals to carry loaded handguns in public spaces across America—churches, parks, schools, government buildings, child day care centers, metro transportation, airports, etc.—when Jeremy’s nine year-old son Colin piped in.

“There are people who think you can prevent violence with guns?” he asked.

“That’s right,” we told him.

“Cuckoo,” Colin replied, tracing rings around his ear with his finger.

I was pleasantly surprised.  It’s not that Colin isn’t a great kid; he is.  But he’s been obsessed with guns since he was a baby.  I distinctly remember a boy of two—denied toy guns by his parents—running around with a vacuum cleaner tube and “shooting” everything around him.  Now, a few years later, he’s graduated to air guns, water guns and violent video games like Commando 2.  This fascination with firearms that boys seemingly acquire upon exiting the womb is both awe-inspiring and disturbing.

So how does this young boy, who delights in shooting his guests with his Nerf N-Strike Maverick Blaster rifle, have the maturity to grasp the enormous danger that real guns represent to our society?  Why is he is able to embrace the thrill of violence in fantasy while rejecting it completely in reality?

Professor McCarthy says, “Peace is the result of love,” but cautions, “If love was easy, we’d all be good at it.”  He also warns, “If we don’t teach [our children] peace, someone else will teach them violence.”

I must have had my own good influences because, like Colin, I grew up with a gun obsession.  One of my prized possessions as a boy was a plastic M-60 rifle, complete with unfolding tripod.  My friends and I loved to get our toy guns out and play “war” around our elementary school.  I was also in the first generation of video gamers, and played all the shooters:  Postal, Castle Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake, Soldier of Fortune, you name it.  And movies?  Die Hard, Predator, Assault on Precinct 13—I loved all that stuff.

Yet I never had the desire to own any real firearms, or mimic the “protagonists” of these games/movies in real life.  I was a big fan of Marvel Comics growing up and it always struck me that Captain America never carried a gun—the bad guys he brought to justice did.  Today, as a husband and father, I have become a passionate advocate for nonviolence.

Professor McCarthy’s dream is to add comprehensive peace studies programs to the curriculum at the nation’s K-12 schools and colleges.  “Every member of Congress was in first grade someplace,” he says.  “Maybe if we taught them a little bit about Gandhi, Martin Luther King, the first day, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in.”

That’s a goal that’s worth working for, but until it is realized, we should all endeavor to learn from kids like Colin.

As Mother Theresa once said, “So often people say that we should look to the elderly, learn from their wisdom, their many years.  I disagree.  I say we should look to the young: untarnished, without stereotypes implanted in their minds, no poison, no hatred in their hearts.  When we learn to see life through the eyes of a child, that is when we become truly wise.”

Amen.