Last Call

It's no secret that African-Americans are the most vocal supporters of gun control laws in the country and for good reason:  black men are six times more likely than white men to be victims of a gun-related crime, and eight times more likely to be the perpetrator.  As a black man, I find both statistics horrifying.

Little wonder then that the NRA in 2013 is depending on minority outreach to black neighborhoods.  The effort is lead by activists like Colion Noir, who makes this argument:



He basically saying that if there's any group that needs the protection of the Second Amendment and should be arming themselves, it's guys who look like me.  And yes, for hundreds of years, black folk have been victimized.  If this sounds familiar, it's because Noir is making a variation of NRA knucklehead Larry Ward's argument that "If slaves had owned guns, there wouldn't have been slavery". 

But the twist here is that Noir's bad guy is the federal government.  Throw that into the mix and you have the bog standard boilerplate of the GOP's outreach to black folk:  the government is enslaving you, it can't protect you, it has abandoned you, so you you rely on yourself.  This would have more impact if the actions of the GOP weren't to actively remove the government's ability to protect people by cutting law enforcement, cutting programs to assist the poor, cutting education dollars and teachers and school equipment, and slashing voting rights and gerrymandering the House.

Sad, really.  But that's the plan:  since white guys aren't selling guns to the shrinking black middle class, maybe black NRA spokesmen like Noir can.

You're just a customer, after all.