Surprised? Anti-Gunners In 1 State Support RACIST Gun Laws

One of the lesser known facts of history is that gun control laws in the U.S. (and in many other places worldwide) were actually implemented for racist reasons. That’s right, gun control laws were put into place to prevent former slaves and their descendants from protecting themselves from racists like the Ku Klux Klan and their political friends who implemented Jim Crow laws and other laws targeting blacks in America for persecution.

While segregation ended years ago, it looks like racist legislation is making a comeback, pushed by the very party that keeps claiming to be for tolerance and inclusion. For example, in one state, members of that political party are pushing gun control legislation that would have the effect of targeting African-Americans in that state. Cam Edwards writes,

The fight over North Carolina’s pistol purchase permit laws is seeing new life, with Republicans in the state Senate picking up legislation that would repeal the Jim Crow-era gun control law that requires would-be handgun owners to first obtain the approval of their local sheriff before being legally allowed to buy a pistol. The North Carolina House of Representatives approved the measure earlier this year, and Tuesday the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to follow suit, though the bill needs at least one more committee vote before being discharged to the Senate floor.

Despite the fact that the North Carolina Sheriffs Association is in favor of doing away with the permit to purchase, many Democratic state senators are fighting to keep the racist gun control law in place.

Now, anti-gunners may argue that the proposed legislation doesn’t target blacks, but when you look at the statistics, you find that, whether the legislation overtly says that it is targeting blacks in that state, the result is that blacks are denied purchase permits at a disproportionately high rate. In fact, Edwards references a paper by Nicholas Gallo, published by the University of North Carolina, which shows how lopsided those statistics are. That paper notes that, in Wake Forest County, North Carolina, between January 1, 2015 and December 3, 2020, 5,519 white permit applicants, out of a total of 65,900 white applicants, were denied while 8,788 black permit applicants were denied, out of a total of 37,340 black applicants.

To put it plainly, there were approximately half the number of total black purchase applicants than white applicants while the number of denied black applicants was 59% higher than the number of denied white applicants. Gallo noted:

In practice, the Wake County Sheriff’s Office rejected 8.37% of White applicants, while rejecting 23.54% of Black applicants. This amounts to Black applicants experiencing a rejection rate of approximately three times the rate of White applicants. Given Wake County’s similar racial composition to that of North Carolina as a whole,187 Wake County potentially represents statewide trends.

So, when you look at reality, when you look at the outcomes in context, you see that the legislation didn’t need to be explicitly racist to have that effect. But like all anti-gun legislation, all legislation which pushes gun control, reality is never the motivating factor.

Legislation pushing gun control is motivated by intentions without any rational thought behind it. Yet, anti-gunners want rational people, people who actually pay attention to the world the way that it is (that would be legal gun owners), to abide by “good” intentions with terrible outcomes.