This Is Not a Joke: The Pro-Gun Control Washington Post Is Now Telling Blacks to Go Get Guns to Fight White Supremacy

by Alexander Zubatov

On March 2, 2018, in the wake of the Parkland massacre, the generally pro-gun-control Washington Post ran an opinion piece arguing that arming teachers with guns would be a big mistake, as it would likely result in making the violence worse while being an ineffectual means of opposing a much more heavily armed prospective shooter:

The only thing that arming our nation’s teachers would do is further escalate an insane situation, one where educators with Glocks, say, are asked, in active-shooter situations, to take aim at assailants with AR-15s. It’s not just adding exponentially more lethal contingencies to an already deadly situation. It’s like bringing a lacrosse stick to a gunfight.

For what it’s worth, I largely agree with that view and am also broadly pro-gun control. But apparently, The Washington Post takes a very different approach when it comes to gun ownership by African Americans. Just over a month after that opinion piece ran, WaPo is running a very different opinion piece arguing that blacks should arm themselves. I am not making this up, and the Washington Post isn’t even bothering to hide the disturbing punchline. The piece is entitled “Why Killer Mike is right: African Americans should own guns” and contains a cover photo of armed-to-the-teeth Black Panther Huey Newton:

The article leads with this observation: “Last month, hip-hop artist Killer Mike used an interview conducted by the National Rifle Association’s media arm, NRATV, to advocate for black gun ownership, chiding members of his community for being ‘lackeys’ of the white gun-control movement.” “Lackeys of the white gun-control movement”? You mean, the “white gun-control movement,” you guys, the Washington Post, have advocated for tirelessly?

But let’s breeze right past that pathetic bit of total and utter hypocrisy. Sure, Washington Post, why not ignore everything you’ve argued for in the past and take seriously and pay credence to an argument about guns made by a guy who goes by “Killer Mike”? And what’s the argument? The case that’s laid out by the writers — professional anti-white racists Ameer Hasan Loggins and Christopher Petrella — is, as best as I can make it out, that African Americans have had a long history in America being disarmed by white people: “gun laws have aimed to arm whites and disarm people of color and indigenous people, part of the quest to maintain white supremacy…. From the earliest days of European colonization, gun laws served as a proxy for regulating and containing people of color and indigenous people.” As a result, many African-American leaders, such as “Malcolm X and advocates of Black Power, including Robert Williams, author of the 1962 bestseller ‘Negroes With Guns,’ believed that because the U.S. government was ‘either unable or unwilling to protect the lives and property’ of black people, they had to defend themselves ‘by whatever means necessary.’ ” Guns laws, we are then told, continue to be used against blacks:

To this day, gun laws are wielded against black Americans. White people may be more likely to own or carry a gun, but black people are more likely to be imprisoned for it, or shot for legally practicing their Second Amendment rights, a reality most clearly exemplified by the 2016 shooting of Philando Castile, for which police officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted of all charges.

So, the Washington Post concludes, “Arming themselves has helped African Americans escape subjugation and enjoy the equal rights promised to them by the law.”

Okay, where to begin? How about we start with this: if African Americans are “more likely to be imprisoned … or shot for legally practicing their Second Amendment rights,” does it logically follow that “[a]rming themselves has helped African Americans escape subjugation and enjoy the equal rights promised to them by the law”? Or might we conclude, rather, that going around packing heat might be an even worse idea for African Americans than for others? (These are rhetorical questions.)

Second, in telling us that African Americans are more likely to be “imprisoned” or “shot” for “legally practicing their Second Amendment rights,” the Washington Post disingenuously elides any engagement with the critical question of why that is the case. Without such a discussion, it is impossible to evaluate this claim or what it means when one is “legally practicing [one’s] Second Amendment rights.” Are these African Americans simply going around with guns and getting shot or imprisoned for it? Or, maybe just maybe, is something else going on? Let’s bring some actual facts into this:

• Despite comprising around 13% of the population, African Americans are responsible for around 38.5 percent of violent crimes (murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery and aggravated assault).
• Despite comprising around 13% of the population, blacks commit over half (52%) of the homicides in the United States.
• Firearms are involved in 10% of all nonfatal violent crime, and 70% of all homicides.

It doesn’t take much high-level math to figure out from these numbers that blacks are, indeed, far more likely to be shot or imprisoned for carrying around guns … but there’s, unfortunately, a very good reason for that: those guns are being used to commit crimes. Now let’s bring some more facts into the picture:

• Blacks are victims of firearm homicides at five to six times the rate of everyone else in America.
• Black men are 13 times more likely than non-Hispanic white men to be shot and killed with guns.
• Homicide is the leading cause of death for black males between the ages of 15 and 34. More specifically, 40% of African-American males between 15 and 34 who died were murdered, compared to just 3.8 percent of white males between 15 and 34 who died.
• 93% of black victims are killed by other blacks. Here’s another way of conceptualizing that data:

• In a situation of domestic violence, if a gun is present, it increases the chance that a woman involved will be killed five-fold.

Again, you don’t need to be a genius to figure this out: if blacks take the advice the Washington Post is urging upon them and go out and buy firearms, the almost certain result will be a further increase in the rate of black crime, black incarceration and, most importantly and ironically, in the number of black men and women killed by guns! Do more blacks behind bars and more black deaths, in the Washington Post’s view, somehow “help African Americans escape subjugation and enjoy the equal rights promised to them by the law”? Is the prospect of fighting some illusory, ill-defined phantom of “white supremacy” that exists in 2018 largely in the minds of race-obsessed pundits like Ta-Nehisi Coates and their legions of liberal white lapdogs and adulators worth this cost? And, for that matter, how exactly are blacks with guns supposed to fight white supremacy? By shooting white cops, as some black militants have done? If white supremacy is supposed to be sewn into the very fabric of this nation and as pandemic and ubiquitous as these professional regressive race-baiters would have us believe, wouldn’t arming blacks — to quote the Washington Post in its saner moments — be “just adding exponentially more lethal contingencies to an already deadly situation” and be equivalent to “bringing a lacrosse stick to a gunfight”?

All told, it is hard to avoid this conclusion: the Washington Post’s opinion piece is poorly thought through, glaringly irresponsible, completely outrageous and deeply alarming. And, given the numbers above, it is blacks who should be most alarmed by what they’re being urged to do. But, when it comes down to it, all of us should be rightfully concerned when a newspaper at the very heart of the political establishment is running articles telling black people that they should be, in essence, taking up arms against America. I have long argued that the toxic miasmas of identity politics in which we are now being doused on a daily basis by the infotainment industrial complex and the organs of the coastal establishment are going to lead us straight to a race war. With the Washington Post’s suggestion that blacks arm themselves for a fight, that war effort has officially taken another big step forward.

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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”

Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Times Higher Education, The Imaginative Conservative, Chronicles, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, Republic Standard, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.

He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).

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Originally published at republicstandard.com on April 12, 2018.