600 Mayors! Oh, My!

Mayor Bloomberg and his Illegal Mayors are pulling out all the stops to try and derail HR 822 – the National Right to Carry Reciprocity Act of 2011. They placed a full page ad in USAToday asking people to call their Senators to oppose the bill. They are saying “This federal mandate would threaten the safety of our communities by putting loaded guns in the hands of people who are too dangerous to qualify for a local permit.” (Sebastian does a good job examining this in the context of Philadelphia.)  Moreover, this ad was signed by 600 mayors from around the country.

That many mayors sounds impressive until you start digging deeper. There are six mayors from North Carolina that signed the ad. They include:

Mark Chilton, Carrboro, North Carolina
Mark Kleinschmidt, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Bill Bell, Durham, North Carolina
John L. Cowan, East Spencer, North Carolina
Charles Meeker, Raleigh, North Carolina
Victor Varela, Ronda, North Carolina

The mayors of Carrboro and Chapel Hill would sign anything that was liberal or anti-gun. Their voters are either college professors, university staff, or college students with a smattering of well-to-do retirees tossed into the mix.

I will grant that Raleigh and Durham are the second and fourth largest North Carolina cities. They have also had a very large influx of migrants from New York and New Jersey who have brought their anti-gun biases with them.

This leaves us with East Spencer and Ronda.

East Spencer has a population of 1,534 and is over 80% African-American. Contrast that with the adjoining town of Spencer which has a similar population but is over 70% white. It is unfortunately obvious that these two towns were separately incorporated due to racial considerations. Unfortunate, too, is that many African-American politicians purposely ignore the racist roots of gun control.

Then there is the town of Ronda in Wilkes County which has all of 455 people living within its town limits.

All told, these mayors represent 7.5% of the population of North Carolina and only two of its major cities. Why should either Richard Burr or Kay Hagan pay any attention to these six mayors given how few people they actually represent?

The slogan of this campaign – “Stop the Washington gun lobby and their allies in Congress from taking away your state’s right to decide who can carry a concealed gun” is reminiscent of what the racial segregationists were saying in the 1940s and 50s. It could just as easily be rewritten to read “stop the Washington civil rights lobby and their allies in Congress from taking away your state’s right to decide if black people should be allowed to eat at whites-only lunch counters”. We are dealing with civil rights in both instances. The Second Amendment is an enumerated civil right and includes the right to self-protection and self-defense. It is a shame that so many mayors want to keep their citizens disarmed and servile just like the segregationist mayors of the Jim Crow South.