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The NRA did not defend legal cannabis patients from having to give up their firearms whilst "recreational" users of the exact same product and Hunter Biden are allowed to get firearms despite conceptually identical restrictions.
That is just one recent example of them not standing up for gun rights, much in the way Glenn shows examples of…
The NRA did not defend legal cannabis patients from having to give up their firearms whilst "recreational" users of the exact same product and Hunter Biden are allowed to get firearms despite conceptually identical restrictions.
That is just one recent example of them not standing up for gun rights, much in the way Glenn shows examples of the ACLU not standing up for free speech. I linked above cases where the ACLU stood up for civil rights, see National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie (you know those pesky socialists also known as Nazi's).
No. the NRA does not deny the State legitimate reason to restrict the rights of an individual FOR CAUSE and in individual cases. "Recreational users" are a class, not an individual. Obviously, Biden should have been denied the right, but I didn't notice the NRA affecting/commenting on this individual's case.
The NRA does not advocate universal gov't provided gun ownership. Is that another case of "not standing up for gun rights"?
I know the NRA supported gun control when black people started buying them.
https://www.history.com/news/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-support-mulford-act
Does being black fall under restricting rights "for cause" with the NRA?
Listen to what Stokely Carmichael says about gun control and people of color.
It is identical to what right wing pro-gun individuals like myself say.
It's also identical to what non-right wing pro-gun individuals like myself would say.
If conservatives could get over the optics, there's much the Black Panther believed they would support. These were not people turning to the government for help. Just the opposite.
The Black Panthers were about coalition building in a way that does not exist in today's politics.
Your first sentence is great. Everything else is false. The panthers have repeatedly preached racism and black supremacy, in the past.
I don't know that they even exist anymore.
So 50 years ago, Blacks exercised their 2nd Amendment rights, and in so doing schooled the NRA. Good for them.
They also used terrorism as a tactic. They also used their guns to scare members of another race into over-reaction, thus imperiling gun rights with their irresponsible behavior. It seems the NRA learned its lesson. Did Blacks? No. Racist Blacks continue to engage in threatening behavior, but whites today treat them with kid gloves because being falsely accused of being racist is apparently a worse fate than anything.
Btw, pretty good article (and the book is even better), but don't those trespassers look a hell-of-a-lot more like an insurrection than those Jan 6ers, with all those guns taking over a State capitol? And BOTH groups causing the essentially SAME over-reaction from the State, and giving the State cover to grow its illegitimate power.
Hmm...a Black group and a white (mostly) group, 53 years apart, trespassing on gov't property, eliciting the SAME reaction. Guess we're not a racist nation anymore, eh?
But that ultimate rhetorical!! It sounds like you are living decades and decades ago.
I'm a big supporter of the 2nd amendment along with the rest of The Bill of Rights, but I don't think The Panthers schooled the NRA at all. I think the Panthers exposed the NRA's hypocrisy when it came to who's 2nd amendment rights they were willing to protect.
The NRA does the same today when they refused to defend Breonna Taylor's boyfriend who fired on the police when they entered her place in the dead of night (the wrong place it turned out) with a no knock raid and killed her. The police originally charged the boyfriend until the public outcry over their screw up forced them to drop the charges. Still, innocent American's go to jail all the time for defending themselves with guns from no knock raids and the NRA doesn't raise a peep when it happens.
You see this pattern with the NRA not protecting the rights of gun owners to defend themselves over and over. The NRA over the past 30 years has simply become another pro-cop lobby that is more interested in winning police loyalty than defending our right to own guns.
To your point above, how is people displaying guns in a way that is legal a form of terrorism, or irresponsible regardless of their skin color and how is the government over-reacting to someone expressing their constitutional rights the fault of the Black Panthers? How are they responsible for those in the State house being afraid of black men with guns? If we are going to base The Bill of Rights on our fears we might as well get rid of it now.
I find it hard to understand why the government over-reacted at a time when the Klan was common and they had no such concern with them. The fact that the State and FBI overreacted to the Panthers call for racial justice with the illegal Cointelpro program that involved things like planting evidence and funding far right extremist groups like the Minute Men to violently fight them was not a good look:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minutemen_(anti-Communist_organization)
Police in the late 1960's would routinely violate the rights of black people during traffic stops, The Panthers were formed to follow the police and when the police pulled over someone black they would let them know their rights. I don't consider a group that works to inform citizens of their constitutional rights during an arrest a danger to society. I will we had something like that now.
They also ran a lunch program for black children in their community along with other support networks. J Edgar Hoover made it clear he believed the lunch program was a bigger threat than the guns because he felt it undermined the legitimacy of the government. It never occurred to him that the government had undermined itself.
I don't buy your generalization that blacks act as terrorists and white people treat them with kid gloves. For every example of a back person terrorizing a white person I can name a white person terrorizing a black person. With 330,000,000 people in the US such general assertions about ethnic groups are based more on a sense of victim hood than any solid data. I don't consider myself a victim and I don't consider entire races of groups in America victims either.
That stupid mob on Jan. 6th were hardly insurrectionists, unless you can provide some proof they planned to violently overthrow the government that I have not seen. These black people on the steps of the California House are not trespassing and are not terrorists since they are not threatening violence. I think we throw around the word insurrection and terrorism far to much, even when people are breaking the law by trespassing as those in Jan.6 did. The Black Panthers here were not even trespassing. The state does not need any excuse to over-react. The State is reactionary by design and will invent it's own crisis if it cannot manufacture one as it did on Jan. 6 and with the Black Panthers. I think as citizens we should avoid victim blaming and being apologists for the State over reacting to things.
Whether we are a racist nation now, or in 1969 or not is for another debate and certainly has nothing to do with comparing these two groups and entirely different events.
There is no parallel between those who trespassed at the Capital on Jan. 6 without guns, largely with the support of the police and had police members among them and the Black Panther who had guns, but did not tresspass or break the and had no law enforcement support.
The Black Panthers were targeted for extralegal assassination by the FBI despite not breaking the law. Those who trespassed at the Capital were arrested and will likely face jail sentences I believe are entirely too long, but you really can't compare these two groups on any level.
The Panthers response to what was done to them was wrong. But that doesnt mean they weren't also wronged themselves and that doesn't mean they didnt also commit wrongs themselves.
When they were up on the stages in the 1960s yelling racist terms like honkey this and honkey that thats the same racism they were ostensibly against.
Dr. King showed the way. You prove beyond any reasonable doubt that you are on the side of right and good and then no one can ignore you.
Dr. King and the Panthers were facing different challenges in different places, so used different tactics. Dr. King would have been no more effective in Oakland and Sacramento with marches than the Panthers would have been in Birmingham Alabama showing up at the State Capital with guns.
That said, like the Panthers, Martin Luther King was always armed to the teeth. Like Condaleeza's parents in Alabama who had to deal with the clan working within law enforcement at the time, King could not always depend on a friendly news camera to prevent a lynching.
I'm not sure how old you are, but was there anyone in the 1960's and 1970's that didn't use racial language? I consider racist language, particularly in the context of the 1960's and 70's pretty weak tea in terms of "wrongs." Their goal was to always get media attention for their agenda and mother-may-I was not going to do it because they had no institutional power.
Most of the so called crimes the Black Panthers committed with the light of time turned out to be nothing more than a state bullshit excuses to carry out government gang land type executions of their leadership.
https://www.history.com/news/black-panther-fred-hampton-killing
For some history, Newton and Seale established the Panthers to monitor police brutality in African-American communities. The Panthers were social activists that pooled community resources to provide things like health clinics and free breakfast programs. They proposed a Ten-Point Program, which included a demand for improved housing conditions, employment, and education for African-Americans.
If petitioning your government for such things is considered radical, I guess I'm a radical too.
I don't agree with their economic politics at the time, but given where they were at within society their Socialist Marxist framework was understandable. What many miss is now is that the Panthers were not a racist anti-white group, which is why J Edgar Hoover felt so threatened by them. There message to the underclass and marginalized communities in general was that they were all getting screwed by the government and should work together to change that. For the Panthers it was primarily a class struggle:
https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/its-a-class-struggle-goddammit-fred-hampton
The modern Black Panthers are anti-white and an entirely different organization. Notice there has been no FBI interference with them since the FBI has no problem with marginalized groups that promote racial ideology. When a member of the previous Panthers offered to debate the new Panthers, the current Panthers declined.
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2000/new-black-panther-party-unlike-its-namesake-1960s
You may be changing my mind. I'm still at the begrudging stage, though, so give me some time.
I'm not sure where you are coming from on this. The 2nd amendment is state agnostic as it is part of the Bill of Rights for all US citizens.
The NRA's pussying out because of CA laws was because they lacked the funding as we recently saw, due to financial mismanagement.
The moment that states started allow medical marijuana the NRA should have been all over the loophole the allowed the ATF to confiscate firearms for medical patients.
Why the fuck would an opiod-prescribed patient be able to get a gun but not a cannabis-prescribed patient? Perhaps it is because of the massive criminal justice job web that lays on top of the drug war and creates jobs on both sides and freedom on none of them.
I concede the medical/recreational CA marijuana issue.
Agreed on the financial mismanagement having a negative effect on protecting gun rights.
Medical marijuana is a joke and a red herring. (But I will offer that the underlying medical condition, if real, that led to the prescription is the rationale, if honest, of denying the right, not the marijuana part. Anyway soon marijuana will be over-the-counter everywhere, as it should be, and REAL medical patients can join their recreational fellows in "self-medicating" freely.)
But this is golden!:
"Perhaps it is because of the massive criminal justice job web that lays on top of the drug war and creates jobs on both sides and freedom on none of them."
Medical marijuana has a LOT more medical value than much of the 150000+ legal drugs on the market in the US.
Specifically with anti-convulsive applications of CBD alone.
I agree with you though that the medical movement was co-opted by stoners who wanted legal weed.
I think you put it way too mildly. "Medical" marijauna was never close to viable without the recreational crowd (otherwise known as my peeps).
Define viable? The recreational drug industry isn't nearly as large as the legal one.
There are more than 150000+ legal drugs in America and like 10 which are illegal because the government cannot regulate their production effectively, and because Nixon and his cronies put onerous drug laws in place pork barrelling onto what Anslinger and his cronies had done.
If COVID hadn't bailed out the DNC states with huge relief $ they would have legalized other drugs soon I believe, just like they did with gambling and weed and other stuff in the past they refused to legalize.
Anything the DNC can tax they are for.