It’s tough to know where to begin on what I just witnessed. Apparently common sense and education are lacking in the people who have been on television talking against gun control. First was Wayne LaPierre giving his 1990s speech on why more people should be armed to protect Americans a week after the shooting in Connecticut. About a week ago the lovable loony Alex Jones showed his true colors by having a ‘patriotic’ meltdown on CNN. While I was outraged by the statement they and others made around the same time, there wasn’t a lot I wanted to say about it because it was the same crazy people saying the same paranoid statements to make like-minded people fearful the government was going to take their guns.

Two statements I read a few days ago got me hot under the collar. They were statements that were personally offensive to me as a black person. I want people reading this to understand why I’m upset with the statements so let me present the first comment made by Ted Nugent in World News Daily (yes Obama is President and he’s still around):

"There will come a time when the gun owners of America, the law-abiding gun owners of America, will be the Rosa Parks and we will sit down on the front seat of the bus, case closed."

It angers me when people who have shown little to no interest in civil rights, and to be clear I mean the civil rights of groups that have been historically discriminated against, invoke civil rights icons to promote their misguided and twisted agendas. Law abiding citizens can get guns, Mr. Nugent. No one is talking about taking away your right to own a gun. Rosa Parks was arrested because she didn’t give up her seat to a white person. The incident with Rosa Parks was symbolic of the discriminatory laws of the United States towards black people. You as a gun owner, Mr. Nugent, haven’t experienced anything close to the discrimination that black people faced at the time of the Rosa Parks arrest.

To say that limiting an ammo clip you can buy, or a background check to see if you are fit to own a gun, isn’t comparable to the what black people have gone through in this country and to try and link them is repugnant to me.
Just when I thought I had seen the depths of the pro-gun idiocy, I was reminded the bar could be set even lower by Larry Ward. Ward is the chairman of Gun Appreciation Day. This is an event that will take place on the weekend of President Obama’s inauguration. That happens to be the weekend before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Ward said . . . you have to see his words to understand:

"I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country's founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history."

I had to watch him make this comment a number of times to make sure I heard him right. Does this man know history? Does he think blacks caught a boat to America to settle here, but once they got here they were rounded up and made slaves because they had no guns? Why does Ward think he can speak to what Martin Luther King Jr. might think?

The funny thing about the comment made by Ward proves he has no sense of the realities of our early history and recent history. To fully understand how his premise is completely wrong, we don’t need to head to slavery times. Let’s go back a few decades to the 60s. Now, if we are to believe the premise Ward set up, giving black people guns would have, possibly, prevented slavery. If we are to believe his premise, having black people with guns would have made the white majority fearful and they wouldn’t dare, because of the guns, think of putting black people in chains. Well, in the 60s you had the Black Panthers. The Black Panthers studied the law and saw yes, you could carry guns out in the open. Famously in California the Black Panthers with armed weapons walked in the state legislature. Remember, at the time this was legal. They didn’t shoot anyone, they didn’t point the guns at anyone, but once they did that, how quickly did the governor and future President / conservative icon get passed a law to prevent that?

People lost their minds in the 60s when black men, free black men were exercising their rights under the law. We had gone past Reconstruction, past the Civil War and I'm sure many people in the 60s felt good showing their black 'freind' at dinner parties. Think I'm joking about the last example? Check out an episode of the 70s show Maude that had an episode where white liberals were vying to get the only black couple they knew to attend a party so that other liberals could be jealous. Considering how enlightened we were in the 60s, and considering how far we have come since then (which some would argue isn't as far as we would like to think) what would make Ward, or anyone like him, think that at the early point of this country's history, where only landowners were allowed to vote (that would mean no women voting as well as blacks), would they think the population would be OK with black people being armed to a degree that slavery would be prevented? That doesn't fit with the truth of the situation and the proof of the illogical premise is what occured in the 60s when were more enlightened.

Ward does what a lot of people do when trying to make a point with a flimsy analogy; they forget that while time goes on people change very slowly. Social ideas may change in general but there are still people who will cling to past ideas like a starving dog like a bone. Even in using what he probably thought was a progressive example, what he was trying to uphold in his argument was that people should be allowed to have unlimited guns and ammunition despite the evidence that more people are stockpiling weapons for a war they can’t win nor would they fight.