Speaking Of Jim Crow Relics

The weekly compilation from the Brady Campaign had an attack on the filibuster. Quoting former President Obama, it was called a “Jim Crow relic”.

This week, President Obama called for the elimination of the filibuster: an arcane rule in the Senate that requires a supermajority of 60 votes, instead of 51, to pass nearly any bill. Our movement knows all too well the dangers of this rule. It’s what stopped Congress from passing lifesaving gun reform legislation following the Sandy Hook massacre.

They were 54 votes in favor and 46 against — clearly a simple majority! But the 60-vote rule stopped Congress from acting  even after 26 students and educators were shot and killed. 

Enough is enough. Why do we need a 60-vote threshold to pass a bill that will save American lives? Fifty-one is the majority, and 51 is fair.

We’re not asking for a lot. We’re simply calling for a simple majority vote — fair and square — to pass lifesaving, evidence-based policy solutions to end gun violence. There’s no excuse for senseless gun violence, especially when legislative solutions have been sitting before Mitch McConnell and the U.S. Senate for over 500 days!

We need to let every Senator know that #51IsFair and gun violence is a national emergency.

Actually, the filibuster and its use in the US Senate predates both the origin of Jim Crow laws and the Civil War. According to a history of it as published by the Senate, unlimited debate was allowed in both the House and Senate. The growth in the number of representatives saw it discontinued in the House but unlimited debate continued in the Senate. Its use to block bills came to the forefront in the 1840s when unlimited debate was used to block a banking bill. The concept of cloture or the ending of unlimited debate by a vote only came into existence in 1917 at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson.

The history of Jim Crow laws and black codes began in 1865 with the adoption of the 13th Amendment which ended slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States once and for all. The black codes were laws enacted at the state and local level which restricted former slaves as to where, when, and how they could work and also restricted their compensation. It served to put many blacks into indentured servitude.

Jim Crow laws were a follow-on that served to enforce segregation, to ban inter-racial marriage, to keep blacks disenfranchised, and, for the purposes of my discussion here, disarmed.

Historians like Clayton Cramer and legal scholars like Dave Kopel and Robert Cottrol among others have shown how many gun control laws were aimed at keeping blacks unarmed and vulnerable.

Let’s talk about two of those Jim Crow relics that I’ve written about in the past. The first from Florida and the second from my home state of North Carolina.

After armed black men using their Winchester repeating rifles prevented a lynching in Jacksonville, Florida, the Florida legislature enacted a law that required a permit for Floridians to carry a handgun or a “Winchester rifle or other repeating rifle.” It was the first law nationwide that treated repeating rifles differently than any other firearm. It was the antecedent to modern day “assault weapons” (sic) bans in states like California and New York (among others).

One need only look to the official proclamations of the Democratic Party and their standard bearer Joe Biden to see that support for such Jim Crow relics as a ban on repeating rifles lives on. In their ideological blindness, neither the Democrats nor the Brady Campaign suffer any cognitive dissonance in pushing Jim Crow originated gun control while attacking the filibuster as a “Jim Crow relic”.

I have written often on this blog about North Carolina’s pistol purchase permit and its role in perpetuating white supremacy in the early 20th century. It was enacted in 1919 soon after a race riot in Winston-Salem. There was a great fear of black veterans returning from World War One. The co-primary sponsor of the bill was Sen. Earle A. Humphreys (D-Goldsboro). Humphrey just happened to be the brother-in-law of US Sen. Furnifold Simmons who was the architect of the Democrat’s white supremacy campaign. The goal was to make it difficult if not impossible for blacks as well as Populists and union organizers to be armed outside the home.

Every time in the last decade a repeal of the pistol purchase permit system in North Carolina is tried, it ultimately fails. Part of that failure is due to recalcitrant sheriffs who don’t want to give up the power or money and the obsequious nature of Republicans towards law enforcement. The other part is due to the unified nature of Democrats and the gun control lobby in opposition. That includes the Brady Campaign. Current Brady Campaign President Kris Brown characterized the repeal effort as rolling back “our decades of a lifesaving policy requiring a background check and a “permit to purchase” for every handgun sale.”

She was wrong. It was an effort to rid the state of the then-98 years of institutionalized racism in the form of a Jim Crow law to keep blacks unarmed and subservient.

It is the height of hypocrisy on the part of the Brady Campaign to rail against the filibuster as a “Jim Crow relic” because it stood in their way of enacting a gun control law. A law that had its very antecedent in a Jim Crow law meant to make it “safer” for racists to lynch innocent blacks.

To be honest, when have politicians or the gun control industry let a little thing like hypocrisy ever get in the way of their pursuit of power.

The answer is never.

Dinner And Education Event On The Racist Roots Of Gun Control

Historian and blogger Clayton Cramer will be the featured speaker at an event co-sponsored by the CalGuns Foundation and the Firearms Policy Coalition on March 29th in Sacramento, California. He will be speaking on the racist roots of gun control. Other speakers include Second Amendment attorneys Don Kilmer, Bradley Benbrook, and Stephen Duvernay, CalGuns Foundation chairman Gene Hoffman, and Firearms Policy Coalition president Brandon Combs.

More info on the event is below. If you are in the Sacramento area on the 29th, this sounds like an interesting event. On a personal note, it is great to see Clayton doing a public event like this given his stroke about a year and a half ago. If you can’t make the event, Clayton has put together a YouTube video on the topic including PowerPoint slides.

Sacramento, CA – Firearms Policy Coalition and The Calguns Foundation have announced a special dinner and education event featuring noted Second Amendment historian Clayton E. Cramer, who will give his talk The Racist Roots of Gun Control.
Cramer will be joined at the March 29 event by firearms law and policy experts including noted civil rights attorneys Donald Kilmer and Bradley Benbrook, Calguns Foundation Chairman Gene Hoffman, and Firearms Policy Coalition President Brandon Combs. Speakers will be taking questions from the audience following the talks.
Tickets for the event, which can be purchased at FPC’s website, are $60 per person and include a filet of beef, chicken, or salmon dinner. College, university, and law school students can purchase tickets at a reduced rate of $30 per person.
Event: The Past, Present, and Future of Second Amendment Policy and Litigation — A Special Evening with Historian Clayton E. Cramer and Friends
Date: March 29, 2015
Time: 5:30 p.m. guest check-in & mixer; dinner 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. (or until Q&A concluded)
Location: Embassy Suites Sacramento – Riverfront Promenade (link to hotel website) (link to Google map)
Speakers and topics will include:
  • Historian Clayton E. Cramer: The Racist Roots of Gun Control
  • Attorney Donald Kilmer: Gun Violence Restraining Orders and the Growing Problem of Constitutional Conflicts in Public Policy
  • Attorney Bradley Benbrook: Firearms-area Litigation and Emerging Second Amendment Jurisprudence
  • Attorney Stephen Duvernay: Active litigation case updates
  • The Calguns Foundation Chairman Gene Hoffman: The Minimum Necessary Right to Keep and Bear Arms – What, Why, and How We’re Doing So Far
  • FPC President Brandon Combs: What to Expect In and From Firearms Policy and Litigation Going Forward

Comment Of The Day

The comment of the day actually comes from this past Saturday. Sebastian had a post on the Melissa Bachman non-controversial lion hunt that has been made into a hate-filled cause ce’le’bre by the world-wide anti-hunting element. Sebastian pointed out the hunting variation of the “I’m a gun owner but…” rationale.

Clayton Cramer had this great comment in the comments section:

Whenever I run into a Fudd, I remind them of one really ugly fact: most of us “extremists” are trying to defend gun rights because of self-defense. If the right to protect yourself from a murderer, rapist, or robber isn’t sufficient reason to own a gun, what makes you think that having a gun for entertainment is going to be a good enough reason?


We all hang together, or we will most assuredly all hang separately.

While a counter-argument could be made that a firearm is necessary to feed one’s family, very few people in this country exist anymore on what they hunt or what they gather.

Clayton’s assertion that we need to hang together is spot-on. I rarely hunt anymore but I’ll defend both meat hunters and trophy hunters against the PETAfiles. I just ask that they try and return the favor.

CCRKBA – Bloomberg “Half Right”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg was on the Jimmy Fallon Show and was complaining that the media doesn’t do a good job of reporting “firearm news” other than mass shootings. The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms agrees and issued this statement.


BELLEVUE, WA – Anti-gun New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was “half-right” when he told NBC’s Jimmy Fallon that there is “scant coverage” of other firearms news, because there is virtually no coverage of self-defense uses every day, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.


Bloomberg complained about the lack of attention paid by the press to “people who are killed by guns every day,” according to Yahoo News.


“Press coverage of justifiable gun use in self-defense is almost invisible,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “yet firearms are used in successful self-defense situations hundreds, if not thousands of times every day. It is disingenuous to talk about crime without mentioning the lives saved because an intended victim was armed.


“We know that hundreds of thousands of lives are saved in this country every year because someone had a firearm,” he continued. “In most cases, a shot is never fired, but the display of a gun sends criminals running.”


He noted examples such as the shooting at a Florida internet café last year, and the intervention by an armed citizen at the Clackamas mall in Oregon last month that stopped a gunman.


“Most of the time,” Gottlieb noted, “if they are reported at all, such stories rarely get beyond local media coverage, and quickly vanish from the headlines. It would be a refreshing change to see the press pay more attention when an armed citizen defends himself, his family, his home or total strangers by being in the right place at the right time.


“While Bloomberg would ignore these people,” he observed, “they really are first responders and they sometimes perform acts of remarkable heroism in saving innocent lives. The press only pays attention to tragedies while ignoring triumphs.


“Mayor Bloomberg is famous for telling half a story,” Gottlieb concluded, “and he wants the press to continue as his surrogate in this campaign to demonize firearms and the people who own them. In truth, gun owners are our friends, neighbors, doctors, the people who teach our children, and many others who have sometimes been called upon to use a firearm to save a life, and we out number him.”

Clayton Cramer used to do a great job in publishing media reports of defensive gun use. Unfortunately, he stopped doing this after getting sued by the charlatans at the now-defunct RightHaven, LLC. While I have checked the old Armed Citizen site, it doesn’t seem up-to-date.

Ben Stein On The Need For Gun Control…Or Not

Economist, lawyer, and actor Ben Stein provides an occasional editorial comment on CBS’s Sunday Morning. Today’s topic was gun control. Contrary to what one usually gets on guns from the mainstream media, this was actually good.

Stein felt the calls for more gun control as well as the attempts to demonize the NRA are misplaced. He pointed out that in places like Chicago, LA, and DC which have strong gun control laws there are many more shootings than in a place like northern Idaho where carrying guns is quite common. While Stein is not sure what the correct answer is, gun control isn’t it.

We know that gun control is a failure and that it will never stop madmen. If we want to prevent the aberrant shootings like Virginia Tech and Aurora, Colorado, I think the answer lies in the mental health realm. This is what Clayton Cramer has been saying for a while now and I think he is correct.