HolyCoast: Today We Honor a Great Republican Activist - Martin Luther King Jr.
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Monday, January 16, 2012

Today We Honor a Great Republican Activist - Martin Luther King Jr.

Yes, he was a registered Republican who led most of his battles against Democrat politicians in the South - governors, mayors, and sheriffs, Democrats all, who tried to stop blacks from enjoying the full benefits of their citizenship in the United States.  Democrats were the party of racism and segregation in those days...and still are today if you look at how their policies have destroyed the black family and minority neighborhoods.  It's not Republicans trying to keep black families dependent on the government.

Dr. King also fought against gun control.  Restrictive gun laws were used to keep black families essentially defenseless and King worked against those laws.  Here's more from Conservative Daily News:
Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Like every year, there will be discussion of his life and achievements. I wish to tell a different story: the story of his struggle against racist gun control laws.

Dr. King, who was a registered Republican, kept guns at home for self-defense. He applied for a permit to carry a handgun, but was denied by authorities in Alabama. Like most states at the time, Alabama had a “may-issue” carry permit system, which allowed authorities to deny a permit for any articulable reason. These gun control laws, in the South, constituted the first Jim Crow laws. As Justice Clarence Thomas noted in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Heller decision, the original intent of the 14th Amendment, passed during Reconstruction, was to guarantee First and Second Amendment rights- and the natural right of self-defense- to newly-freed black people. I noted the irony of Herman Cain, a black man who lived during Segregation, making a “states’ rights” argument about gun control antithetical to this cause.

There is another gun control issue which must be raised, in relation to Dr. King. In order to understand it, one must understand the extraordinary lengths black people had to go to in order to acquire firearms in that time period. Few dealers were willing to sell firearms to blacks; among those few were pawnbrokers, who also commonly sold firearms in that time period. Since much of their clientele was black (pawning was generally the only source of credit for blacks back then), pawnbrokers were more amenable to selling guns to them.

For black families who didn’t have access to an agreeable pawn shop dealer, the options for buying guns were very limited: Finding a sympathetic white person to act as a strawman to buy guns for them; pooling money with other families to travel to a gun store in a Northern state; or by mail order.

All of these activities were prohibited by the Gun Control Act of 1968. This act instituted an exceptionally restrictive licensing scheme for gun dealers- a scheme which required a special license to act both as a gun dealer and pawnbroker; it banned the interstate transfer of firearms except between licensed dealers; and it banned mail-order, out-of-state, and straw man purchases.

An historical point must be noted here: The assassination of Dr. King fueled the passage of the ’68 GCA. Let me state that again:
Dr. King’s assassination was used as political ammunition to pass a gun control law intended to frustrate black people from buying guns for self-defense.
There's a little more at the link. I'd include a quote from Dr. King but his greedy family would probably send me a six figure bill, just as they did the foundation that built his memorial because they used his words on the "frozen in Carbonite" monument in D.C., words that it turns out were taken out of context and will have to be corrected at great cost.  I wonder if they have to pay the family another fee?

I'm sure the Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln families got big bucks for their famous ancestor's words as well.

1 comment:

Larry said...

Charlton Heston led an interesting life during the civil rights era, long before Hollywood found it fashionable, marching alongside King to protest things like the segregation of restaurants.

From Wikipedia:
By the 1980s, Heston opposed affirmative action, supported gun rights and changed his political affiliation from Democrat to Republican. When asked why he changed political alliances, Heston replied "I didn't change. The Democratic party changed."