Race and the Gun Debate – No Guns For Negroes, Robert Williams and The NRA vs The KKK

Juan Williams has this piece at the Wall Street Journal.  I’ll start with Juan’s ultimate opinion and work back:

One thing you don’t hear much about in the discussions of guns: race.

That is an astonishing omission, because race ought to be an inescapable part of the debate…

I support gun control.

He’s a leftist, even if he’s one who’s on FOX news as a contributor, and even if he did get blackballed for saying some things the left didn’t approve of.

He doesn’t understand, however, that gun control is inherently racist.  Juan Williams must not know the racist history of gun control:

Disarming blacks made blacks unequal, despite freedom from slavery.  This contributed to the societal problems that led to crime and led to the opportunity to be oppressed later on.

Williams spends the rest of the article looking at the destruction of the black family, which is the effect of things like the Great Society, which replaced the family unit and the father with government.  He blathers for a bit about how black and hispanic folks favor gun control “because they’re the victims of gun crime” he says, while ignoring that they’ve been chopped into ethnic Democrat voting blocs that typically fall in lock-step – all due to the same effects of programs like the Great Society that foster dependence on government.

“I’ll have those n*ggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” — Lyndon B. Johnson to two governors on Air Force One according Ronald Kessler’s Book, “Inside The White House”

That same subjugation by dependence on government and subjugation by racist gun control led to communities which could not defend themselves.  Individuals had to rely on police for protection, often the same police that would oppress them, or otherwise ignore their communities and thus individual cries for help.  Disarmed, only the criminals could defend themselves, while the law-abiding were left at the mercy of both gangs and racists.  Due to being only a couple generations from slavery, the individual may not have been properous enough to escape a bad community; but again, the only reason the community was as bad as it was was because of government deciding what was best for black folks.

Every cause that Williams looks at for violence in the black community is the direct result of government interference.

Thomas Sowell wrote a few years ago about how Oakland, CA, used to have a thriving black community with thriving black-owned small businesses in the 1950s.  Rather than improve when social programs were implemented in the 1960s, the entire community began to decline.  He also notes that leftist judicial policies contributed heavily to the decline.

In short, it’s not the guns.  The lack of guns made individual blacks defenseless and the black community less safe – criminals in armed communities know that someone may resist, whether those criminals are black gangs or white night rider terrorists.  The interference by government in the form of gun control undermined safety, and the interference by government in social and economic aspects of life destroyed the family that was the building block of that society.

It’s the welfare state and government telling black folks how to live their lives that creates the problems.  Further restricting the rights of black citizens – including gun rights – isn’t going to help.  Restrictions of rights never help anyone of any color.

Just ask Otis McDonald:

—

The other half of the race and the gun debate story today was an email exchange involving racist black Alabama Democrat state representative Joe Mitchell, who demonstrated ignorance of his own history by going off on a constituent:

“Your folk never used all this sheit (sic) to protect my folk from your slave-holding, murdering, adulterous, baby-raping, incestuous, snaggle-toothed, backward-a**ed, inbreed (sic), imported criminal-minded kin folk.”

Except if you just watched No Guns For Negroes above, you know that the Deacons For Defense did “use all this sheit”, and if you know the history of the NRA during the civil rights movement, you also know that his colorfully-worded condemnation is completely bogus and woefully ignorant of the history of gun rights being used for black defense:

In Monroe, North Carolina, in 1958, Mr. Robert Williams reopened a local chapter of the NAACP. He enlisted the help of Dr. Albert Perry, a physician and leader in the Black community. These two men created an active and robust local chapter of the NAACP and worked for equal rights for the Black population.

However, Monroe was KKK country. The Klan included in its membership the sheriff, most police officers, several judges and every elected official in the county. As the Black population grew more organized the Klan became more brutal.

Mr. Williams was a former U.S. Marine who understood that force must be met with force, so in 1960 he turned to the nation’s oldest civil rights organization for help. He applied to the National Rifle Association for a local charter. The NRA issued him the charter and supplied firearms training material.

Officially sanctioned as the Monroe NRA Rifle Club Mr. Williams recruited other Black veterans. The group armed themselves and started training with their guns. This further infuriated the Klan but it also inflamed the white liberals who had previously supported Mr. Williams and Dr. Perry.

The liberals were no more interested in seeing Black men exercising their Second Amendment rights than the Klan was. The White liberals were only interested in the Black population attaining some rights, not in securing the full rights afforded all free men by their creator.

The Klan was quick to recognize that the Blacks no longer enjoyed the support of the White liberals and increased their harassment of the Black community. Armed Klansmen regularly drove through the Black section of town shooting into homes and shooting at anyone unfortunate enough to be out after dark. Frequently, these drive-by shootings were preceded by a police patrol car that scouted targets for the Klan.

Unable to disband either the local NAACP branch or the local NRA branch, the Klan decided to mount a full, armed assault on Dr. Perry’s home. They thought they could bring down the groups by eliminating their most influential leader.

The local NRA branch heard about the planned raid and quickly called a meeting to be held at the doctor’s house on that night. Well armed men showed up at the doctors house and prepared for the assault they knew was coming.

When the Klan arrived, instead of finding the good doctor alone with his family they found the house fortified with sandbags and guarded by armed men who knew how to use their weapons. A firefight ensued.

The Klan and their police support were no match for the local NRA members. The NRA members drove off the attackers inflicting unknown causalities on the raiders.

What we do know is that this was the last time the police joined the Klan in a raid in Monroe. It wasn’t the end of their support of the Klan, but it was the last time the police openly joined in an armed attack on a Black home in Monroe.

And on the off chance you don’t like that story, you can read basically the same one from PBS.

The point is the same, and John Bender at Federal Observer wrote it well over 10 years ago:

As Monroe demonstrates, Blacks should be among the strongest supporters of the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment puts teeth in the rest of the Constitution. It guarantees personal freedom far better than any paternalistic government program. In Monroe, as in much of the country, Blacks couldn’t look to the government for protection. The Klan controlled the government there. Their only defense was self-defense. The men in the local NRA showed that they were up to the task of defending themselves and their families. They didn’t need some elitist demigod to protect their rights.

Under the laws we have today the men of Monroe would be unable to mount such a defense. So called “Saturday Night Special” laws and laws against discount mail order sales of guns, price guns out of the reach of many low wage citizens. Registration and licensing laws would tell the Klan sheriff who had guns and allow him to round them up before any raid today.

If the sheriff in Monroe had access to the BATF’s national firearm files he could have disarmed the local NRA members before the Klan raided the doctor’s home. Instead of the Klan being driven off, things would have ended very differently. This story would be a story about just one more successful Klan raid on a defenseless Black family.

What’s Safe From Sequestration?

National Journal has a nice list.

Many aren’t surprising.

Low-income programs, including:

Academic Competitiveness/Smart Grant Program;
mandatory funding under the Child Care and Development Fund;
Child Nutrition Programs (including School Lunch, School Breakfast, Child and Adult Care Food, and others, but excluding Special Milk);
Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP);
Commodity Supplemental Food Program;
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the TANF Contingency Fund;
Family Support Programs;
Federal Pell Grants;
Medicaid;
Foster Care and Permanency Programs;
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps); and
Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

When the Founders wrote “provide for the common defense, secure the blessings of liberty, and promote the general welfare”, they did not mean handouts – especially when the first thing cut is providing for the common defense.

Why Work? – The Absurd Future of the Welfare Cliff

From the UK Sun:

A SKIVING couple told last night how they claim £17,680 a year in benefits — and don’t even bother looking for work because it would leave them worse off.

Danny Creamer, 21, and Gina Allan, 18, spend each day watching their 47in flatscreen TV and smoking 40 cigarettes between them in their comfy two-bedroom flat.

It is all funded by the taxpayer, yet the couple say they deserve sympathy because they are “trapped”.

They even claim they are entitled to their generous handouts because their hard-working parents have been paying tax for years.

The couple, who have a four-month-old daughter Tullulah-Rose, say they can’t go out to work as they could not survive on less than their £1,473-a-month benefits.

The pair left school with no qualifications, and say there is no point looking for jobs because they will never be able to earn as much as they get in handouts.

Financially, they as individuals can see what’s in their best interest.  It’s in their best interest to take from the taxpayer.

Gina admits: “We could easily get a job but why would we want to work — we would be worse off.”

They’re just a symptom.  The disease is the governmental policies that enable and support them.

Consider the American Welfare Cliff:

The blue is take-home wages after taxes, and the rest are handouts from various sources.  There are greater rewards to less work.  In Britain, it’s become so bad that there are greater rewards for no work at all.

The welfare-taker is just exploiting a system that’s set up for exploitation.  It works the same in the US.  The working stiff is busting her butt for 8-10 hours a day, while the welfare-taker is at home on his butt playing Xbox for 8-10 hours a day, then going out to party at night.  He doesn’t have bills to worry about, as they’re all paid for by people who are working.  She does have to worry about bills.  He has an entire political party dedicated to telling him that he’s downtrodden and oppressed, and that only they, who give him free stuff, will help him.  She’s got a choice between two parties – one that says they support her, but that takes her money and gives it to the welfare-taker, and the other that “compromises” because they don’t want to look like meanies… and so mostly does the same thing.

The welfare-taker (or zero-liability voter, as Andrew Wilkow likes to call them) is voting himself largesse from the public treasury, and one party wholly supports him – because they know they have his vote for as long as they give him plunder from other citizens.  The working stiff has her tax money diverted from legitimate functions of government (national defense, post roads, etc.) and sent to the welfare-taker.

At some point, solely looking at the bottom line, it becomes clear that one is the winner – having their life provided for by the state, and one is the loser – being taxed by the state to provide for others they have no obligation to.  In the long run, the system implodes.  In the short term, the politician who provides welfare is the one who gets benefits – being able to demonize those who oppose welfare as “heartless”, directly giving handouts to people to pay for support, and they get the constant reassurance that their meddling is “necessary” because they are the only ones who can “save” the little people.  It’s Munchausen by proxy on a massive scale.  And it serves the interest of the politicians’ Curley Effect.

A Time For Choosing

Covers many things we still deal with today.

Tax Hike Surprises

From the NY Post:

New Yorkers of all income levels got a rude awakening yesterday when they saw in The Post how much more they will pay in taxes next year without a fiscal-cliff deal by Jan. 1.

“It’s that much higher?” asked IT worker Vikas Kataria, 34, who discovered that his combined household income of about $250,000 per year will cost him nearly $10,000 more in taxes.

“I thought it was a couple thousand — but that’s a lot,” said Kataria, who works at Merrill Lynch in Manhattan and is married to a systems analyst for a brokerage firm. “That’s huge!”

–

Jan Losick, a Medicare-aged counselor at Au Pair in America, makes about $150,000 when combined with her husband’s salary, and would pay about $6,000 more.

“The Senate and the House of Representatives should be sacked!” said Losick, who would have to cut down on vacations, going to the theater and eating out, and just stick to the basics. “They should be doing our bidding — not their own.”

With a likely tax increase of $2,200 looming, Andre Hunter, 49, is kissing his dream of owning a home goodbye.

Funny, because they don’t get that home ownership is viewed as a problem by bigger forces.

See, the thing is, Democrats are for higher taxes, and they don’t negotiate – Democrats don’t compromise.  Remember this exchange?

Boehner to Obama: “I put $800 billion [in tax revenue] on the table. What do I get for that?’
Obama to Boehner: “You get nothing. I get that for free.”

If we go off the cliff, Obama blames Republicans in congress.  If congress negotiates, Obama takes what he wants anyway and Republicans end up voting for tax increases, while there are no spending cuts made – the same thing that happened to Reagan in the 1980s.  Or Democrats just send us off the cliff anyway and reap the rewards.  The Tea Party Republicans in congress are standing firm against raising taxes and demanding concessions in the way of spending cuts, but Obama has demonstrated that he just doesn’t care.  He gets to hurt his political enemies, and he gets to hurt the citizen and blame his political enemies for it.  It’s very cruel, Alinskyite politics, but that’s what happens when you elect a man raised by communists.

Also, Democrats saying “revenue” are cleverly disguising that what they are doing is trying to take money out of Losick’s pocket, or Hunter’s house, or from Kataria’s pocket.

Because they don’t understand that higher taxes mean people will flee the taxation rates, and will work less to earn less, even well-meaning Democrats who aren’t totally on board with the Obama ideology will never see these ideas solve anything.

And then there are those Democrats (again, Obama) who avidly use the Curley Effect to create new voters, who know that increased taxes mean it’s often financially better for people to stay on welfare.  Of course, once you’ve got them addicted to handouts, they’ll always vote for Democrats.

The Cliff/Stimulus Problem Summarized in One Phrase

From Yahoo News:

The total bill: about $255 billion out of the federal government’s pocket – an amount the GOP would likely say needs to be offset by spending cuts elsewhere.

For emphasis, I’ll write it again, if you missed it the first time, and I’ll put it in bold.

The total bill: about $255 billion out of the federal government’s pocket – an amount the GOP would likely say needs to be offset by spending cuts elsewhere.

The federal government doesn’t have pockets.  It doesn’t have money of its own.  It has what it takes from the taxpayer.

That right there sums up so much of the problem – the belief that government has money and that it doesn’t take it from taxpayers… and that can be extended to a lot more problems in the proposition, as well as pretty much all of the root overspending causes.

This is the proposition:

How about a little government economic stimulus?

That may sound incongruous considering the budget deficit and the push from Republicans to cut government spending.

But President Obama’s first offer to avoid going over the “fiscal cliff” holds out the hope of at least some stimulus. This would include extending the 2 percentage point Social Security payroll tax cut, boosting a tax incentive to businesses, establishing a $50 billion bank for long-term infrastructure projects, and extending unemployment benefits.

Stimulus doesn’t work, it’s more Keynesian idiocy.  Why doesn’t it work?  Because it takes from the citizen either through direct taxation or through devaluation of the citizens’ currency, strains it through government, and redistributes it to losers that can’t function in a free market.

This is redistribution plain and simple.  The government will take $255,000,000,000 from taxpayers, then turn around and spend much of that money on an army of bureaucrats to filter it through, then give it to programs and policies that aren’t working and aren’t solvent on their own, and in some cases, those that directly hurt both the nation’s ability to engage in an economic recovery.

UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS

And, finally, Obama wants to extend unemployment benefits, which would cost about $30 billion.

Under current law, if Congress does nothing, the maximum number of weeks in which an individual could receive jobless will drop to 26 from the current 73 weeks for states with unemployment over 9 percent and 63 weeks for states with unemployment over 7 percent.

If Congress does nothing about the program during the lame-duck session, some 2.1 million jobless will lose their benefits in the first week of January, says Judy Conti, a federal advocacy coordinator at the National Employment Law Project (NELP) in Washington. By the end of the March, she says, another 900,000 people will lose their benefits.

“Forty percent of the unemployed are long term unemployed,” she says. “They have been out of the workforce for over six months.”

Oh really?  You think the reason they might be out of work for 6 months is because they get 17 months of unemployment benefits that incentivize not working?  Of course, Ms. Conti is an advocacy coordinator (a job that would not exist in the free market) whose existence in life is entirely dependent on her ability to take from some by force and redistribute to others.

There’ve been studies done on unemployment before, and every time, the eggheads who study it are shocked to find out that when unemployment runs out, people get jobs.

Consider the Welfare Cliff from the other day:

Unless you’re making a lot, there are diminishing returns to actually working.  And when you’re making close to $50,000-$60,000 in benefits for not working, why bother?

The planners are either naively blind to this, or are embracing it as a destructive means to obliterate the United States.  Of course, it’s “government money”, as in, once again, taken from productive citizens and given to non-productive citizens, all the while enshrining the state as the lord and savior of the poor, naive serfs.

And the politics of it are Obama setting the doofus Republicans up to either take the blame for tax rate increases (that the Democrats were opposed to during the Bush years) when he doesn’t work with Republicans, or for being the winner when he gets to institute whatever policies he feels like if they cave… and he’ll still blame their “obstructionism” for his own failures.

When Work is Punished: America’s Welfare State

The whole post at ZeroHedge is worth reading, but this one graph from a Pennsylvania report on welfare’s failures is the short short version:

If you’re working, the line of actual income is red, the line of take-home income after taxes is in blue.  The various other colors are other government handouts that contribute to actual take-home income.

There are many places along the chart, even at higher incomes, where not working is more profitable than working.

Obama, the Food Stamp President

HT Jawa Report, from Mystery Patriot:

More:

Obama My the Numbers – Food Stamp Dependency 2 of 2

Paul Ryan’s Speech and the Facts: Part 3

Continued from Part 1, and Part 2.

ThinkProgress goes on with point 5:

5. “$716 billion, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama.” Ryan’s favorite lie is a deliberate distortion of Obamacare’s savings from eliminating inefficiencies. Furthermore, Ryan’s own plan for Medicare includes these savings. Romney has vowed to restore these cuts, which would render the trust fund insolvent 8 years ahead of schedule.

Oh, this is fun.  Obamacare takes $716 billion from Medicare to pay for itself.

From there, ThinkProgress goes into fantasyland.  Obamacare’s savings are projected savings.  They don’t exist.  They’re supposed savings that will happen in the future.

That’s like saying I’m going to beat Michael Phelps at swimming in 2016 because I decided to do a lap in the pool today.  My projected athletic potential is unrivaled!  I’ll do powerlifting and do a 100-meter dash faster than a Suzuki Hayabusa while I’m at it, and then be hanging out with Michelle Jenneke in the Olympic village.

Okay, now that you’ve “right-clicked, saved as” and moved on, I’ll reiterate.  It doesn’t matter what promises you make if you don’t keep them.  See point 3.  It doesn’t matter what projected savings you have when those savings don’t materialize.  You can’t say “I’m gonna, I’m gonna”, especially when you have a track record for “I didn’t, I didn’t”, or worse yet “it’s not my fault, it’s his fault”.

And ThinkProgress finishes up with point 6:

6. “The greatest of all responsibilities is that of the strong to protect the weak.” Ryan closed the speech with an invocation of social responsibility, saying, “The truest measure of any society is how it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves.” However, numerous clergy members have condemned Ryan’s budget plan as “cruel,” and “an immoral disaster” because of its devastating cuts in social programs the poor and sick rely on. Meanwhile, Ryan would give ultra-rich individuals and corporations $3 trillion in tax breaks.

They really are clueless.  This is actually a bit of actual Republican code (hint: it doesn’t have anything to do with racism).  It’s a subtle way to say to pro-lifers that there’s a interest in protecting the unborn, who are by their very nature, weak.  It’s a point to say that things like the Born Alive Act would be supported.  Interesting that ThinkProgress only thinks of the poor and sick adults, who can work their way out of their weakness, rather than newborns who are by their very nature without even legal protections.  But regardless, their opinion here is also flawed.

Duties to one’s fellow man are supposed to be those that we assume of our own volition.  If you choose to help your neighbor, you do so out of your own concern.  If you do so because the government mandates it, you get people who are disinterested in their fellow man because “the system” is supposed to take care of them.  This is why every year, often around Christmas, when a news story comes out saying that conservatives give huge amounts to charity and leftist-statists are skinflint scrooges, leftists are surprised.

“You find that people who believe it’s the government’s job to make incomes more equal, are far less likely to give their money away.”  Compassion, however, should be rooted in personal engagement; liberals fail to match conservatives in this area.

The “devastating cuts in social programs” are good things.  It helps people to help themselves.  Thomas Sowell, among others, has written at length about how the welfare state has caused a decline in those it’s supposed to help.  Sowell specifically cites the example of how the black family has been destroyed by programs mean to “help”, and how individual black Americans find themselves figuratively enslaved to a system that makes them into perpetual wards of the state.  Same applies to anyone else whose individuality and individual accomplishment is subsumed into identity politics along class lines which lead them to believe they have a station in life that they cannot escape.

ThinkProgress’s accusation of a lie is based on their own opinion, an opinion that is disproven by facts, history, and the conditions of those who are subject to government “help”.

Furthermore, tax hikes and increased spending on those who are unfortunate does nothing but harm those who are actually working to improve their lives.  If you’re working at $15/hour and you lose another $1/hour to pay for someone else to sit and not work, your life is harmed by being forced by goverment to fund a government bureaucrat to redistribute your hard-earned income.  If you’re working at $15/hour and your boss, who’s an evil rich robber baron who’s both evil and rich and spends his leisure time racing flying machines with his dog Muttley, has his taxes raised, that means he may not be able to pay you as much.

That means he may not be able to employ you at Evilco.  With workman’s comp and Obamacare and social security and FICA and a dozen other impositions, he may not be able to afford to pay for your labor.

And then you’re out of work.  This gives the government bureaucrat someone else to distribute wealth to, but it hurts you.  We’ve covered this ground before many times, but it’s worth looking at the second and third-order effects of taxes and “social programs” that are nothing of the sort.   $3 trillion in cuts to employers and a climate of stability means businesses will expand.

You may not get a job making fantastic flying machines, but you might be working in the top hat and cape business instead.  It’s economics.

So out of 6 contentions of lies, ThinkProgress is wrong on all of them.  Except for point 3, if you’re somebody who cheats on their wife and says “but I said I’d be faithful, I didn’t promise I wouldn’t cheat!  That’s not saying I wouldn’t cheat!  I didn’t promise that!”  Basically what you’d expect from someplace called “ThinkProgress”.

Economics in One Lesson XIII: Government Price Fixing

From “On the Other Hand” by the western Canadian Frontier Centre for Public Policy:

Price-fixing doesn’t work, and they make the important point that wages are also a price – they are the price an individual chooses to sell their labor at.  When the government sets a minimum price for labor, it means that someone who’s labor is not worth paying the minimum wage for, like young people, disadvantaged folks with limited skills, etc., can’t even get entry-level jobs that would then let them boost their potential wages through acquiring experience.  They can’t add value to their labor, because no one wants to buy their labor at the price the government sets.

Minimum wage laws by themselves don’t work, something we noted waaay back on the old site, with the Job-Killing Impact of Minimum Wage Laws.