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.

My brother and sister and I grew up in a pacifist anti-nuclear community, conversant in the dark corners of Mutual Assured Destruction and nuclear winters from an early age. Living with so many different people over the years, we were exposed to all sorts of ways that good hearted, radical, thoughtful people interact with children.

At nightly prayer there were a number of women who insisted on saying “awoman,” instead of “amen.” I was so influenced by this that I took to calling mayonnaise “womanaise.”

At dinner, we were exposed to your garden variety vegetarians and vegans (and a lot of lectures about same), but also raw foodists, people who only drank juice and those who weighed all their portions. We also sat down with people who used kelp instead of salt and who railed against white sugar as though it were a tool of Satan himself (or herself?). Everyone took turns cooking, and we’d watch our dad carefully. If he got out the peanut butter at dinner it meant that he did not like what was being served—he would never say anything—and we could eat just peanut butter sandwiches too.

A lesbian woman who lived with us taught us to say “directly forward” when we were giving directions, instead of “straight.” Her point was that the dominant (male) culture prioritized straight over other directions and made us think that straight was the only way to live. I think that was her point, anyway. Whatever it was, it must have worked, because our sister is a lesbian. (Ha.)

By way of contrast, our own parents—as a former nun and priest and often at least a decade older than other community members—were fairly conventional (strange to say) in their child-rearing techniques. Please, thank you, eating all one’s dinner so as not to thumb one’s first-world chubby nose at the starving children of Africa, may I please be excused, long lectures about one’s behavior (differentiated from other kids’ long lectures only by the frequent, learned, biblical references and occasional diatribe against morally corrupted American consumer culture), occasional spankings.

You get the picture. They were kind of normal—at least compared to the other people we lived with, and if you set aside the whole protesting and getting arrested and going to jail and talking about one’s faith all the time stuff. They ate meat, drank alcohol (though it was seldom on hand at home), enjoyed classical music, cursed with passion and imagination when provoked, and enjoyed detective novels.

We were not allowed to watch TV (morally corrupted American consumer culture). The worst thing we could do was fight with one another (which my brother and I did constantly; a peace accord was signed in high school). The second-worst thing we could do was lie, which my brother and I did all the time to cover up for our TV-sneaking and our fighting.

I learned a lot from the people I shared the dining room table with growing up—but less about healthy eating than about obsession and fixation and control. I learned to work around my parents’ prohibitions on TV and gorged myself on it when I could. (To this day, if a TV is on in a room, I can’t not watch it.) I learned to lie to be able to do what I wanted and still be an appropriate peace activist kid. I’m not proud of learning all of that. I don’t like it… but I did it.

Disclaimer Needed, though: Food obsessions and lying is not all I learned from my parents and all those other good folks. My point is that the lessons adults want to impart are not always what is learned by the kid.

I have been thinking about all of this because now I live with a five-year-old wonder half of every week. Does it really matter if she plays with magic wands or swords? Why do I want her to call it a wand when she wields it like a sword? If she is having fun and not hurting anyone, does my politically-correct overlay do anyone any good? Or is it just a semantic absurdism like womanaise?

What do we teach children by our words and actions? What do we want children to learn? What happens when what we teach and what they learn are not the same thing?  How can I be a parent who is learning right alongside this marvelous five-year-old rather than imposing my vision of the world on her little shoulders? How can I be a parent who makes the world safe, beautiful and governed by some logic (while still being honest about its morass of problems and our responsibility for all of that) for the tiny four-month-old being growing inside of me?

Children are little insurrections. They turn our lives upside down and they insist we see it through their eyes—and they care more than anything about fairness and friendship. Maybe we have more to learn than to teach.

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.

I know Winkler.  I’ve heard him speak in person and on the radio.  I’ve read his articles.  And he always struck me as a very intelligent, reasonable, and politically moderate guy.  But that’s the point—Winkler’s central thesis in Gunfight, in a nutshell, is “The gun rights movement is extreme, the gun control movement is extreme, and I’m right here in the middle to show you how we should deal with this issue.”

The problem with that argument, as the New York Times Book Review pointed out, is it’s not really accurate:

[Winkler] suggests the debate over guns today is dominated by “strident groups:  one set on getting rid of the guns; the other determined to stop guns from being restricted in even modest ways” and that both sides are vociferous and loathe to compromise.  Mr. Winkler supplies a lot of examples of pro-gun extremism.

He quotes Ron Paul saying that…a “lack of respect for the Second Amendment” contributed “a whole lot to the disaster of 9/11.”

He also quotes Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, asserting that the “U.N. wants to impose on the U.S.” nothing less than “total gun prohibition,” a sentiment held by many militia-group members as well.

But Mr. Winkler implies that gun control advocacy is similarly defined by extremists—by people who would like to “eliminate all privately owned firearms—or, at least, make the United States more like England, where handguns are illegal and all other guns are rare.”  And in doing so Mr. Winkler ignores or plays down the many reasonable, centrist arguments made, for instance, by Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group led by Michael R. Bloomberg of New York.

Personally, I’m still waiting to find out which gun control organizations in the United States are advocating that we “eliminate all privately owned firearms.”  I’ve been working in this movement now for over a decade and I have yet to meet them.  In fact, I don’t know of any “dominant,” modern gun control organization that has ever argued for any such thing.  And Winkler, of course, is well aware that the Supreme Court’s 2008 D.C. v. Heller decision took bans of anything but “dangerous and unusual” firearms completely off the table (in the minds of the Citizens United Five, this would likely include fully automatic machine guns and possibly certain semiautomatic assault rifles, but nothing else).  Gun bans are no longer a policy option even for select localities.

But that reality didn’t stop Winkler from throwing gun violence prevention advocates under the bus to sell books.  And unfortunately, “extreme” isn’t the only label we were hit with.  Because the gun rights movement is racist (Winkler notes that “one of the few places you can easily find virulent racist literature is at a gun show”), then the gun control movement has to be, too.

On this point his argument becomes even shakier.  Winkler can cite no example of the contemporary gun control movement being racist.  He even acknowledges that an overwhelming majority of African-Americans today support strong, strict gun laws.  So his argument basically comes down to the fact that our Founders prohibited slaves from owning firearms and white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan have disarmed blacks at times while brutalizing and killing them.  And that somehow adds up to gun control having “racist roots.”  At the same time, Winkler curiously acknowledges that “many other laws” have been used to oppress African-Americans throughout our history.  No kidding.

Despite the whole thing being pretty nuanced and flimsy, the gun rights movement got a hold of Winkler’s “racist” argument and ran with it.  All of a sudden, they had their moderate to hold up as proof that their ugly accusations (or should I say projections) were true.

Again, Adam Winkler is a smart guy.  He must’ve known that pro-gun extremists were going to jump all over this.  They might call him a “gun grabber” and heckle him in person (you see, there’s a lot of stuff Winkler says in Gunfight that gun rights activists flat-out don’t like), but the “gun control is racist” thing?  Oh yeah, that’s like throwing chum into shark-infested waters.

As someone who’s worked extensively with gun violence survivors—people who don’t want other Americans to have to endure the personal tragedies they’ve experienced because of weak gun laws—I was a bit sickened by the whole thing.  Who in their right mind would infer that these people are motivated by racism?  So I showed up at a recent panel discussion that Winkler was participating in and asked him to clarify his argument.  You can watch the full exchange in the above video or read this transcript.

While holding to his point that “historically gun laws have often been used to oppress racial minorities,” Winkler made it clear to me that he does not “think that it means gun control today, all gun control laws today, are racist.”  He added, “I’m in favor of a variety of different kinds of restrictions,” and specifically cited “shoring up [gun buyer] background checks” and prohibiting gun sales to those on the FBI’s Terrorist Watch List as gun control proposals that are not racist.  Winkler also reiterated that gun control laws are far from alone in having a history of being used in a discriminatory manner, saying, “I think in most areas of law we should continue to be skeptical of legislation where there is a history of race and racism, but gun laws are no different in that sense.”

It is therefore confusing that Winkler would assert, “I do think that gun laws historically have been tied to race and racism and we should take that seriously when we’re thinking about a gun control law today.”  Why?  If African-Americans have moved beyond the past and strongly support contemporary gun control proposals (which even Winkler acknowledges are not motivated by race), why should it be an issue?  Winkler gave the current example of the race issue playing into voter suppression bills in state legislatures across the country, but—of course—the legislatures passing these anti-democratic bills are the same ones that take their marching orders on gun bills from the National Rifle Association, not gun violence prevention advocates.

The real gold nugget in my exchange with Winkler was easy to miss.  Talking about the Founding Fathers barring slaves from owning guns, Winkler said, “I think that helps inform their idea that the Second Amendment was not a Libertarian license for anyone to have a gun anytime they want, but that they balanced gun rights with what they thought was appropriate for public welfare.”

That’s certainly an insight the pro-gunners will not be parroting.

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.

62-year-old home owner George Woodson

The circumstances behind the shootings differed widely: A garage owner who shot a pistol-wielding robber and killed him … A 21-year-old man who was killed with his own gun by his ex-girlfriend’s current boyfriend after showing up at her townhouse one night… A 62-year-old home owner who fired 4-5 rounds into a car containing a man and his girlfriend because he believed the man was “throwing bricks at his house” (the man was hit in the leg and wounded) … And finally, a 20-year-old woman who wrestled a gun away from a teenage robber in an alley late one night and shot him to death.

When Pintek introduced our segment on December 17, he openly celebrated all of these shootings, describing them as justifiable homicides (or attempted homicides) by “law-abiding” citizens. He opined that those killed in these incidents were thugs and criminals who were a drain on society—they were worthless and should not be missed.

I took a different tact. I stated that while two of the shootings appeared to be justified given the scant facts we had on hand—the ones involving the garage owner and the 20-year-old woman—the other two were clearly not. Two young men fighting over a woman is not cause for murder. Nor is a brick being thrown at a house, if indeed that happened. Furthermore, I noted that the violence in all these incidents escalated because of the unbelievably easy access that Americans—including children, criminals, and those with impaired judgment—have to firearms. That didn’t sit well with Pintek, but we agreed to disagree and parted ways politely.

I was therefore surprised to receive an instant message shortly thereafter from a friend who had tuned into the show. “Did you hear what Pintek did after you signed off?” she asked. She then informed me that he had read a comment on the air from a listener who took exception to my remarks…and stated that he wanted to shoot me. This was apparently just fine with Pintek—he made no mention that shooting people who disagree with you is neither morally or legally justifiable.

The email I sent that day to Pintek’s program director, Marshall Adams, seeking his comment and plan of action regarding this threat has yet to be answered.

For some reason, weeks like the ones described above just make me more determined to prevent the loss of life to gun violence, and to build a more peaceful society. I suspect that many of you who write and comment here at Waging Nonviolence are the same way. Thank you for your good works and for gaining energy from adversity.

• 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.

“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.’

All Aboard
Almost as soon as the McDonald ruling was issued, articles began to appear in popular conservative periodicals declaring gun control to be “racist.”

Robert “Guns are Fun” Farago and David Rittgers opened fire in the Washington Times and National Review, respectively.  Farago proclaimed that:

The McDonald decision is really a victory for and about black Americans … America’s gun-control laws owe their genesis to the post-Civil War era, when white southerners moved to disarm freed slaves.  The former Confederate states’ successful efforts to restrict gun ownership had disastrous long-term consequences for black Americans’ life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

Rittgers stated that:

Racism created gun control in America. Confronted with the prospect of armed freedmen who could stand up for their rights, states across the South instituted gun-control regimes that took away the ability of blacks to defend themselves against the depravity of the Klan.

Even moderate African-American commentators Clarence Page and Courtland Milloy jumped on the bandwagon.  Page commented:

Armed self-defense is a long-running theme in black American history.  As recently as the 1960s, the Deacons for Defense and Justice were a popular, powerful self-defense group in the last days of Jim Crow segregation. Yet news media paid more attention to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his nonviolent side of the civil rights movement.

Milloy, suggesting that many blacks view Justice Thomas as an “Uncle Tom,” nonetheless praised him for “a scorcher of an opinion that reads like a mix of black history lesson and Black Panther Party manifesto.” “[Black people] might not agree with his conclusion, but there’ll be no mistake about where he’s coming from,” he concluded.

Back to the Beginning
Forget for a moment that the two propositions examined in this article seem to be contradictory (i.e., If gun control laws had targeted blacks for disarmament, how would they have been able to successfully engage in armed resistance against White terrorists during Reconstruction and the civil rights movement?) and let’s evaluate them separately.

For starters, the “gun control is racist” argument, working from the McDonald decision, makes the assumption that there was no gun control before the Reconstruction period.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  As Justice John Paul Stevens noted in his dissent in McDonald:

From the early days of the Republic, through the Reconstruction era, to the present day, States and municipalities have placed extensive licensing requirements on firearm acquisition, restricted the public carriage of weapons, and banned altogether the possession of especially dangerous weapons, including handguns … After the 1860’s just as before, the state courts almost uniformly upheld these measures.

These laws were enacted to provide for the public’s safety, not to discriminate against any particular minority, and were enforced uniformly against all state residents.

Additionally, regarding the argument that the 14^th Amendment was somehow focused on gun rights, Stevens was not persuaded:

Consider, for example, that the text of the Fourteenth Amendment says nothing about the Second Amendment or firearms; that there is substantial evidence to suggest that, when the Reconstruction Congress enacted measures to ensure newly freed slaves and Union sympathizers in the South enjoyed the right to possess firearms, it was motivated by antidiscrimination and equality concerns rather than arms-bearing concerns per se … Apart from making clear that all regulations had to be constructed and applied in a nondiscriminatory manner, the Fourteenth Amendment hardly made a dent.

This is not to say that there were not discriminatory gun control laws at this time—and other times—in our history that specifically targeted blacks.  But the fact is that for most of our 234 years, the entire U.S. legal system has been arrayed against blacks.  Using gun rights activists’ weak logic, one could claim that virtually any type of law has racist origins:  property laws, marriage laws, tort laws, contract laws, etc., etc.  Just because there was once racial inequity in certain, long-abolished laws, however, does not mean we should abandon all efforts at government regulation.

Rebellion and Retribution
Did lack of access to firearms play a unique role in preventing blacks from vindicating their rights prior to the civil rights movement?  That seems to be the obvious inference of statements like, “The former Confederate states’ successful efforts to restrict gun ownership had disastrous long-term consequences for black Americans’ life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.”

The problem is that history is replete with examples of African-American communities being severely punished and repressed after they did take up arms against white terrorists.  Take, for example, the admission by David Rittgers:

Confronted with the prospect of armed freedmen who could stand up for their rights, states across the South instituted gun-control regimes that took away the ability of blacks to defend themselves against the depravity of the Klan.

Then there are Eli Cooper and Nat Turner, two African-Americans cited by Justice Thomas in his opinion in McDonald.  Thomas cites the remark that Cooper is alleged to have made in Georgia in 1919:  “[The] 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.”  What he doesn’t tell us is that this statement was apparently the provocation that caused 20 white men to attack Cooper in his home with axes and knives.  Nor does Thomas explain how a firearm would have preserved Cooper’s life in such a situation.  Finally, the same newspaper article cited by Thomas that mentions Cooper also tells the story of Berry Washington, a black man who was lynched in the same town as Cooper mere months earlier.  Washington took up arms against a White terrorist, shooting and killing a man who was about to rape his 16-year-old daughter.  After surrendering to the local sheriff, Washington was pulled out of jail by a mob and lynched.

Thomas also refers to Nat Turner, a Virginian slave and preacher who staged a rebellion to seek God’s judgment against the institution of slavery.  The revolt began on the night of August 13, 1831, when Turner and six of his followers went from house to house killing slave owners and their families with a hatchet and a broad axe.  At each house, the rebels freed any slaves they encountered and stocked up on more weapons.  Eventually, his force numbered 60 men—all armed with guns, axes, swords and clubs.  The revolt lasted nearly 10 days and 57 whites were killed before the group was pushed back by militia and federal forces.  Although Turner escaped, he was caught two months later, immediately convicted, and hanged.

In Virginia, the retribution was brutal:

A reign of terror followed in Virginia.  Labor was paralyzed, plantations abandoned, women and children were driven from home and crowded into nooks and corners.  The sufferings of many of these refugees who spent night after night in the woods were intense.  Retaliation began.  In a little more than one day 120 Negroes were killed … One individual boasted that he himself had killed between ten and fifteen Negroes … Negroes were tortured to death, burned, maimed and subjected to nameless atrocities.

Thomas himself tells us the broader consequences of Turner’s exercise of “Second Amendment rights”:  “The fear generated by these and other rebellions led southern legislatures to take particularly vicious aim at the rights of free blacks and slaves to speak or to keep and bear arms for their defense.”

The Colfax Massacre is another tragedy frequently cited by the majority in McDonald. Colfax actually began as a civil rights success story.  During the Reconstruction period, African-Americans in the small Louisiana town elected officeholders, held important public positions, and even organized a state militia company led by a black man, William Ward.   Eventually, however, their unit was demobilized after moving too aggressively to arrest white terrorists.  A withdrawal of federal government support set the stage for the massacre on April 13, 1873, when between 62-81 African Americans—more than half of them armed with firearms—were slaughtered by a larger, better-equipped force of whites.

As my boss, CSGV Executive Director Josh Horwitz, and Casey Anderson put it, according to gun rights activists:

…the collapse of Reconstruction—and every tragic consequence that followed—could have been avoided if the newly freed slaves had had access to firearms. This explanation of events is a fantasy.  It is easy…to identify incidents where the victim of racist violence might have defended themselves more effectively if they had been armed with guns.  The idea that white racists could have been kept in check by ensuring widespread access to firearms among black southerners, however, is absurd.  In fact, the American experience during and after Reconstruction illustrates that the…premise…that private ownership of guns safeguards individual rights against tyranny of the majority is exactly backward in explaining the relationship between private force and state power in protecting individual rights … Not only is the claim that gun rights could have stopped the Jim Crow system a falsehood, but it covers up the even more important insight that [this argument] is a continuation of a concerted effort, born and nurtured in the antebellum South, to limit the federal government’s effectiveness in protecting the democratic rights of the most vulnerable Americans.

I can’t help but think of Lifetime National Rifle Association (NRA) Member Rand Paul advocating for the repeal of a section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and stating that gun carriers should be a protected class like minorities.  Nor could “Reclaim the Dream” rally organizer Rev. Al Sharpton when he recently referred to Paul while noting that King’s life work was conducted “for the precise purpose of pushing for increased federal action and involvement to nullify all discriminatory state and local practices.”

“Soul Force”
It is clear that armed resistance—while often noble and heroic—did little to vindicate the rights of African Americans during and immediately after Reconstruction.  Is there any evidence it was more effective in the 20^th century when the civil rights movement became a national cause?

The leading proponent of the “armed resistance won the civil rights movement” idea is Dr. Lance Hill, the Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University and the author of The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement.  In his book, Hill gives primacy to the role of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, a group that wielded guns against white terrorists and provided armed guards for nonviolent protests in certain local communities in the South from 1964-1968.  Hill’s central thesis is that:

Nonviolence unquestionably defined the black freedom movement from 1954-1963 … But by the end of 1962 Martin Luther King and the more militant nonviolent organizations had fallen victim to state repression and terrorism.  The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), [Congress of Racial Equality] CORE, and Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had all failed to secure local reform, voting rights, or protective federal legislation … [The Deacons’] willingness to retaliate against Klan violence ultimately forced the federal government to enforce the Civil Rights Act and the Bill of Rights, assert federal supremacy, and destroy two major pillars of white supremacy—local police repression and Klan terror.

The problems with Hill’s argument are obvious.  The Deacons were (and remain) a little-known group that had no discernible impact on the national civil rights movement.  The group did not even form until the summer of 1964 in Jonesboro, Louisiana.  This was after Brown v. Board of Education; after Rosa Parks refused to leave her seat on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama; after federal troops integrated Little Rock High School; after student sit-ins were initiated at lunch counters across the Deep South; after the “Freedom Riders” boarded buses to test desegregation laws; after the University of Mississippi was integrated; after a national television audience watched “Bull” Connor turn fire hoses and police dogs on demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama; after more than 200,000 attended the historic March on Washington; after the 24^th Amendment abolished the poll tax; and just as President Johnson was signing the Civil Rights Act into law with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. looking on.

It is difficult to find any historians outside of Hill who view the Deacons or other armed groups as the engine behind the great achievements of the Civil Rights Movement.  Howard Zinn, in A People’s History of the United States, concluded, “King’s stress on love and nonviolence was powerfully effective in building a sympathetic following throughout the nation, among whites as well as blacks.”  Peter B. Levy, author of The Civil Rights Movement, wrote:

For many Americans, the image of Connor’s German shepherd dogs biting at the limbs of peaceful protestors became a symbol of the viciousness and ugliness of the southern way of life.  Polls showed an outpouring of support for King; letters and telegrams poured into the White House expressing support for the goals of the movement… It took the assassination of John F. Kennedy, brutal assaults against nonviolent protesters in Birmingham, Selma, and elsewhere, and a massive lobbying effort to gain passage of [the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act].

Journalist/author Charles Lane, reflecting back on the Colfax Massacre, wrote, “The revolutionary new ingredient was nonviolence.  The dignified resistance of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legions succeeded where William Ward and P.B.S. Pinchback had failed.”

King understood that white supremacists were the only winners when blacks resorted to violence.  “The plain, inexorable fact was that any attempt of the American Negro to overthrow his oppressor with violence would not work,” he said.  “The courageous efforts of our own insurrectionist brothers, such as Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, should be eternal reminders to us that violent rebellion is doomed from the start.  Anyone leading a violent rebellion must be willing to make an honest assessment regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-armed wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that would delight in exterminating thousands of black men, women, and children.”  “And when it was all over,” King noted, “the Negro would face the same unchanged conditions, the same squalor and deprivation.”

From his jail cell in Birmingham, King laid out his belief that, “There is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest.”  Why did nonviolent protest succeed where armed rebellion had failed?  “The social tool of nonviolent resistance…was effective in that it had a way of disarming the opponent,” King wrote.  “It exposed his moral defenses.  It weakened his morale, and at the same time it worked on his conscience.  It also provided a method for Negroes to struggle to secure moral ends through moral means… The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, so that when the battle is over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor.”

Even after his home was bombed in Montgomery, King told blacks: “Don’t get your weapons.  He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword.  Remember that is what God said.  We are not advocating violence.  We want to love our enemies.  I want you to love our enemies.  Be good to them.  Love them and let them know you love them.”

King could see that there was only one path to freedom for African-Americans:

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline.  We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.  Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The millions of African-Americans who engaged in nonviolent action to obtain their rights as democratic citizens during the civil rights movement rose to such “majestic heights” time and time again.

The Target Audience
In a Pew poll taken last year, an overwhelming majority of blacks, 72%, said it was more important to control gun ownership than to protect the right to own guns.  Only 20% said that protecting the right to own guns was more important.

There’s a good reason why few African-Americans associate guns with “freedom” and “liberty.” The national U.S. homicide rate is 5.3 per 100,000 people.  Among blacks, it’s 20.9 per 100,000.  That’s four times the national rate and seven times the white rate.  In 82% of black-victim homicides in which the fatal weapon can be identified, it’s a gun.  And 73% of those gun deaths are inflicted by handguns.

Charles Lane has said that, “Firearms pose threats to modern-day urban dwellers—crime, suicide, accidents—that may outweigh any self-defense they provide.  Unlike 19th-century rural Americans, we can call on professional police.”

Otis McDonald might not agree, but certainly other African-Americans in his community do.  Annette Holt, whose 16 year-old son was shot and killed on a Chicago school bus while shielding a fellow student from harm, called the McDonald v. Chicago decision “a slap in the face to all of us who have lost children to gun violence.”

Then there is the Chicago City Council, which voted unanimously to approve the city’s strict, post-McDonald gun laws.  Robert Farago was blunt in his assessment:  “Not to put too fine a point on it, Chicago’s new handgun-licensing laws are inherently racist.”  NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre ranted about “defiant city councils” that seek to “nullify” McDonald with regulations that are akin to “the poll tax or the literacy test.”  Both men failed to mention that 20 out of the Chicago City Council’s 50 members are African-American.

One has to wonder if the tragic irony of the McDonald decision was lost on the Supreme Court’s conservative majority and pro-gun activists.  “[The Second Amendment] now is being used to help protect a black Chicago man from local gangbangers,” Clarence Page wrote.  Those gangbangers aren’t white terrorists from days gone by.  In many cases, they’re black kids with sophisticated weaponry courtesy of a deliberate marketing effort by firearm manufacturers.  The Bureau of Justice Statistics has reported that, between 1976 and 2005, 94% of black homicide victims were killed by blacks.

I Know You Are, But What Am I?
Could gun rights activists’ attempts to paint those who advocate for gun control as racist be the result of a guilty conscience?  Gun lobby leaders are certainly no strangers to questionable comments about race.

In 1990, NRA Board Member Ted Nugent told the Detroit Free Press magazine that:

…apartheid isn’t that cut and dry.  All men are not created equal.  The preponderance of South Africa is a different breed of man.  I mean that with no disrespect.  I say that with great respect.  I love them because I’m one of them.  They are still people of the earth, but they are different.  They still put bones in their noses, they still walk around naked, they wipe their butts with their hands … These are different people.  You give ‘em toothpaste, they f***ing eat it.

One year later, another NRA Board Member, Jeff Cooper, commented on gun homicides in Los Angeles in Guns & Ammo magazine:

The consensus is that no more than five to ten people in a hundred who die by gunfire in Los Angeles are any loss to society.  These people fight small wars amongst themselves.  It would seem a valid social service to keep them well supplied with ammunition.

NRA Director of Research Paul Blackman agreed with Cooper, writing that since young homicide victims “are frequently criminals themselves and/or drug abusers,” their deaths offer “net gains” to society.

In December 1997, former NRA President Charlton Heston made the following remarks at a Free Congress Foundation event:

Why is ‘Hispanic pride’ or ‘black pride’ a good thing, while ‘white pride’ conjures up shaved heads and white hoods?  Why was the Million Man March on Washington celebrated in the media as progress, while the Promise Keepers March on Washington was greeted with suspicion and ridicule?  I’ll tell you why:  cultural warfare … Mainstream America is depending on you, counting on you to draw your sword and fight for them.  These people have precious little time or resources to battle misguided Cinderella attitudes, the fringe propaganda of the homosexual coalition, the feminists who preach that it’s a divine duty for women to hate men, blacks who raise a militant fist with one hand while they seek preference with the other.

Then there was the bizarre, insulting 2003 editorial by Gun Owners of America Executive Director Larry Pratt, entitled, “Why Blacks Tend to Support Gun Control.”  “Hatred is the ‘glue’ that has been used by many black leaders—preachers and politicians alike—to keep blacks on the plantation,” wrote Pratt.  “Not surprisingly, one of the elements of the liberal worldview supported by many blacks is opposition to self-defense. Indeed, most black politicians are gun-bashing anti-Second Amendment zealots … Dependence on the state for food and shelter includes depending on the state for protection.  That the state provides none of these things well has not shaken the firmly held commitment to restricting firearms.  Regarding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), [Rev. Lee] Peterson says this: ‘These are radical socialists who have little respect for individual responsibility or the Second Amendment.’”

Finally, you have to wonder how African-Americans feel when they hear a gun extremist like Philip Van Cleave of the Virginia Citizens Defense League describing efforts to legalize the carrying of guns in bars by saying, “We tried to throw off the bonds that have tied down gun owners unconstitutionally for years.”

A Familiar Tune
In today’s political climate, not even progressive African-Americans are immune from the “racist” charge, whether it’s Glenn Beck claiming that President Obama has a “deep-seated hatred for white people” or Andrew Breitbart creating an alternate history where USDA employee Shirley Sherrod refuses to help white farmers.

Ultimately, there is nothing racist about efforts to reduce the annual toll of 30,000+ gun deaths in America.  In 1963, Dr. King expressed great concern about “our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim.”  He also decried a popular culture which taught children “that the hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing.”  Those concerns remain equally valid today, nearly half a century later.

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.

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.

It can be depressing—and also intimidating. Recently, I spoke to gun violence prevention activists in Virginia who were preparing to support their mayor at a city council meeting. You see, this mayor had the temerity to join a group called Mayors Against Illegal Guns and that outraged the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL), who believe there should be no regulations concerning gun ownership. One other thing about VCDL: their members pack heat 24/7, including at city council meetings. Several well-meaning individuals concerned about gun violence felt compelled to stay home that evening after considering the prospect of facing 60 some-odd armed men at the meeting.

I really can’t blame them. I’m not scared of these guys myself (I’ve been around them long enough to think of them more as weird uncles, or the like), but what am I supposed to tell the mother of two young children who’s trying to be supportive and do the right thing? “Don’t worry about that guy with the Glock 40 and ‘Guns Save Lives’ decal on his jacket”? That would be a tough pitch even for Ricardo Montalban.

If one person can inspire the courage necessary to face such situations, however, it is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I find myself repeatedly going back to a passage in his autobiography that is striking—and absolutely inspiring.

As we all know, Dr. King faced constant threats to his life during his time as a prominent civil rights leader in America, and was eventually felled by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. During his life, he wrestled often with the question of whether or not to carry a gun for self-defense. After his house and the house of a friend were bombed in 1956, Dr. King wrote the following:

After the bombings, many of the officers of my church and other trusted friends urged me to hire a bodyguard and armed watchmen for my house. When my father came to town, he concurred with both of these suggestions. I tried to tell them that I had no fears now and consequently needed no weapons for protection. This they would not hear. They insisted that I protect the house and family, even if I didn’t want to protect myself. In order to satisfy the wishes of these close friends and associates, I decided to consider the question of an armed guard. I went down to the sheriff’s office and applied for a license to carry a gun in the car; but this was refused.

Meanwhile I reconsidered. How could I serve as one of the leaders of a nonviolent movement and at the same time use weapons of violence for my personal protection? Coretta and I talked the matter over for several days and finally agreed that arms were no solution. We decided then to get rid of the one weapon we owned. We tried to satisfy our friends by having floodlights mounted around the house, and hiring unarmed watchmen around the clock. I also promised that I would not travel around the city alone.

I was much more afraid in Montgomery when I had a gun in my house. When I decided that I couldn’t keep a gun, I came face-to-face with the question of death and I dealt with it. From that point on, I no longer needed a gun nor have I been afraid. Had we become distracted by the question of my safety we would have lost the moral offensive and sunk to the level of our oppressors.

I think of these words often. Here was a man who had a wife and four young children, a man whose house had been bombed, a man whose phone rang incessantly with death threats (in a pre-caller ID era)—and yet King decided to disarm himself and his bodyguards. Furthermore, he felt safer after doing so.

Why? Did Dr. King realize that a man who arms himself and see his neighbors as potential enemies is more likely to find the trouble he is seeking to avoid? Or is the secret to King’s sense of peace that, in his own way, he was armed? “Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon,” he wrote, “which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.”

Thinking of Dr. King’s example, I would feel shame to ever cower in the face of intimidation or frustration in seeking justice. And seeing how he continues to inspire generations that were born after he left this earth, I am more confident than ever that King’s peaceful path is the powerful and just weapon he described.