Sticking with today’s topic of the intersection of guns, race, and McDonald v. Chicago, I thought I would also point out another article worth reading. This one, by Courtland Milloy is entitled In Clarence Thomas’s gun rights opinion, race plays a major role. An excerpt can be seen below:
Referring to the disarming of blacks during the post-Reconstruction era, Thomas wrote: “It was the ‘duty’ of white citizen ‘patrols to search negro houses and other suspected places for firearms.’ If they found any firearms, the patrols were to take the offending slave or free black ‘to the nearest justice of the peace’ whereupon he would be ‘severely punished.’ ” Never again, Thomas says.
In a scorcher of an opinion that reads like a mix of black history lesson and Black Panther Party manifesto, he goes on to say, “Militias such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, the White Brotherhood, the Pale Faces and the ’76 Association spread terror among blacks. . . . The use of firearms for self-defense was often the only way black citizens could protect themselves from mob violence.”
Justice Thomas is a greatly thoughtful man. His opinion is well-founded. We are a nation of laws and this nation has been preserved by men and women willing to defend her militarily, via domestic police and via our gun laws which enable us to protect ourselves and our families. Beware of anyone who wishes to take away that right "for our own good." Likewise our right to use guns for sport.