Roy Cooper, Brady PAC, And Systematic Racism

I just listened in on a public Zoom webinar with Gov. Roy Cooper (D-NC) hosted by the Brady PAC and the Democratic Governors Association. It featured Cooper, Wendi Wallace of the DGA, Brian Lemak of Brady PAC, and Kris Brown, president of Brady United.

I should note off the bat that the chat function and any way to ask questions was disabled. I imagine that was to prevent any awkward questions from being raised by the audience.

It started with Wendi Wallace who is the Deputy Executive Director of the DGA. She came to them from the Planned Parenthood Action Fund last year. She was praising the efforts of the governors of Nevada and New Mexico to bring more gun control to those states.

The conversation then switched to Brian Lemak and Kris Brown. Among the things they said is they are hoping that with Roy Cooper that they can make North Carolina into the next Virginia. In other words, to impose gun control from on high upon the people of North Carolina. They said they are making North Carolina one of their highest priorities at all levels – Federal, state, and even county commissions.

Finally they allowed Cooper to speak. He welcomed this opportunity to talk about “gun safety”. Cooper then started out by saying the usual boilerplate of I grew up on a farm, I am a gun owner, and I support the Second Amendment. He then segued into his support for “responsible gun laws” and talked about the campus shooting at UNC-Charlotte.

Cooper then went to talk about how Obama carried North Carolina in 2008 but that there was a Republican “backlash” in 2010 which allowed them to take both houses of the General Assembly. Not only that but those Republicans had the temerity to gerrymander the state to keep their seats. This led to the state “going backwards on gun laws”.

He said when he was elected in 2016 that the Republicans still held a super-majority in the General Assembly. Cooper said he had three tools with which to stop “bad legislation”: the bully pulpit, the veto, and executive orders. This is where he noted his veto of HB 652 saying guns didn’t belong in schools. I’m not going into that here with the exception of noting that the bill only applied to schools attached to churches and that no firearm were allowed during school hours including during extracurricular events.

As to executive orders, Cooper said he ordered the State Bureau of Investigation to send over 200,000 more names to the NICS system after it was discovered a number of convictions had not been reported. What he didn’t say and didn’t want the listeners to know is that for most of his tenure as Attorney General of North Carolina (2000-2016), the SBI was under his control. It was only moved from the Department of Justice to the Department of Public Safety in 2014.

Cooper moved on to existing laws including the Jim Crow-era pistol purchase permit law. He said he wanted to expand that law to include “assault weapons”. He thought honest and responsible gun owners would go along with that. Cooper also mentioned his support for red flag laws.

The discussion then moved into more political matters such as mail-in ballots, how the Brady PAC planned to focus on not only Cooper’s race but the race for Lt. Governor, the pandemic, etc. Then Cooper said how he said the fight against “systemic racism” need to be a priority.

This is where I exploded.

What more obvious an example of systematic racism exists than a law specifically passed to prevent African-Americans from having access to handguns, other concealable weapons, and pump shotguns! Historian Clayton Cramer found in his research that the impact of the law was “to grant discretion to local white officials to use their discretion to disarm nearly all blacks and some disreputable whites of deadly weapons.”

All four on the webinar today would have denied that gun control had its origins in keeping African-Americans disarmed. However, the record is what it is and it’s legacy is systematic racism that progressives say they abhor.

As to the rest of the webinar, I couldn’t take any more and turned it off.