The Right to Self-Defense, Black People, and the NAZI Rifle Association
by Joe Veale
July 3, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
When Philando Castile, a Black man, was stopped by police in Minnesota for a supposed traffic violation, he calmly told the police he had a licensed gun. The pig blew him away, and walked free. And the National Rifle Association—the big defenders of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, the “right to bear arms”—suddenly fell silent.
Why? For starters, when this amendment was adopted, Black people were slaves. Said to be only 3/5 of a human being. Black people were made the property of rich white plantation owners.
The slave ALWAYS wants to kill the slave master. So of course there would be no “right to bear arms,” just as there would be no other rights. In fact, the whole point of this amendment in the first place was to enable slave owners, as well as those who were stealing land from Native American Indians, to form up militias to enforce this thievery, murder and enslavement.
When slavery and capitalism could no longer coexist and slavery was abolished through a Civil War—the system of white supremacy was held in place by Jim Crow and the sharecropping system that served the capitalist system. And this system was held in place by the right of white men to bear arms—to carry out lynching and other forms of terror against Black people.
But the oppressor ALWAYS FEARS those it oppresses. The oppressed ALWAYS want to throw off that which torments them. ALWAYS want to get the boot of oppression off of their necks.
As Black people came into the cities, the police—still backed up by armed white mobs and the kinds of racist vigilantes who killed Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis and Renisha McBride—became the new enforcers of oppression.
Now we are living in times when those who rule this system have put a straight-up Hitler—a regime of fascists, Nazis, KKK pigs and women-hating thugs—in the driver’s seat to govern their system, to meet the challenges they face in the world.
Including some of the challenges they face here—bringing down the New Jim Crow on people even harder—because this same system finds it has no profitable use for millions of Black and other oppressed people, leaving them in situations where they are forced to compete with each other in the illegal economy—with its rules of revenge and retaliation.
All this backed up and enforced through this system’s judicial system—which allows murdering pigs to walk over and over—again, again and again—each time they say: “I feared for my life…” as they gun down—in cold blood—a Black person.
Those in the ruling class desperately FEAR Black people exercising their “right” to bear arms in this situation. And now the so-called National Rifle Association—which should more correctly be called the NAZI Rifle Association and which was so silent on Philando Castile—loudly calls on its minions to “bear arms” to help them in this and other atrocities and fascist repression.
When the Oppressed Defend Themselves…
But when the oppressed begin to righteously defend themselves against their oppressor and his violent, illegitimate actions, then that system and all that holds it together can begin to come apart.
The Deacons for Defense and Justice, a Black group, exercised their “right” to defend civil rights activists against white racist lynch mobs, the KKK, and the sheriffs in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama during the 1960s. They did it according to law.
Robert Williams did the same thing in North Carolina, leading armed self-defense of the Black community against the KKK.
Later, in Oakland, California, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and the Black Panther Party legally armed themselves and patrolled the police to make sure the police would not get away with brutalizing or murdering Black people.
What did the powers that be do? Did they support, applaud, encourage, and back people for exercising their right to bear arms? HELL NO!
In each case the FBI, together with the KKK and the local police, illegally bugged people—set people up on charges that could mount to decades and life in prison—murdered or attempted to set up people for murder—hounded people out of the country—for exercising the “right” to bear arms—for righteously defending themselves against illegitimate attack, whether carried out by the KKK or the police.
The oppressor ALWAYS fears those it oppresses exercising the "right" to bear arms.
Why? Because when the oppressor’s ability to get away with dehumanizing, brutalizing, and murdering people is met with self-defense, then the lines are drawn sharply for everyone in society—and the question is sharply posed:
Who is just in exercising the right to bear arms? Those who represent a system that cannot do without such savage inequality and oppression—or those who exercise the “right” to bear arms to defend themselves against those who enforce such dehumanizing and illegitimate oppression?
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