"I firmly believe that part of the current intransigence is because those gun homicides disproportionately affect poor minorities. (Gun suicides disproportionately affect white people.) Indeed, the only time that national figures seem to get fully engaged is in the wake of mass shootings that involve white people, either as shooters or victims."
See the full article here.
Mr. Blow goes on to quote narrative from Adam Winkler's 'Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America'
And here's a piece regarding Mr. Winker's book that was published in today's Chicago Tribune!
"In the early Republic, the Second Amendment was no barrier to strict laws governing firearms. The founding generation kept guns out of the hands of slaves, free blacks, and loyalists who opposed the American Revolution. Officials in some communities counted and registered guns and public safety prompted safe storage laws that mandated unloaded weapons by requiring the storage of gunpowder on a building's top floor. After the Civil War, former Confederates forcibly disarmed freedmen in the South, while in the so-called Wild West, frontier towns prohibited concealed weapons. The need to combat heavily armed gangsters led to prohibitively high taxes on particularly deadly weapons during the Great Depression. When the radical Black Panthers took to exercising their legal right to brandish weapons openly, California legislatures, with Governor Ronald Reagan's support, passed tough measures to disarm them. In many instances, the National Rifle Association went along with modest controls in the name of public safety."
I'm just sayin'
