As Reason recently pointed out, gun rights have often helped in the struggle for minority civil rights in America. The right to keep and bear arms is, after all, a natural right that should be denied to no one.
So why, then, is income inequality champion and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg claiming that “it’s a joke” for young minority males to have a gun?
It seems these types of racist sentiments are nothing new for Mr. Bloomberg. He instituted a NYPD policy of “stop, question and frisk” which led to 84 percent of stops being black or Latino. It turned out, according to the NYPD 2012 statistics, the likelihood that an African American would have a weapon during a stop-and-frisk was half that of white New Yorkers stopped. When it came to discovering contraband, officers were a third more likely to find illegal items on a white suspect. [RELATED: Bloomberg Defends Controversial Stop & Kiss Program]
Regardless, in front of a sold out crowd at the Aspen Institute this past week, Bloomberg accused minority males between the ages of 15 and 25 of being responsible for “95 percent of all murders.”
This claim is a ridiculous, factless assumption. While young black homicide offenders in the U.S. outnumber young white offenders, such a damning disparity does not exist. According to the FBI, in 2012, white offenders accounted for 4,582 of murders while black offenders amounted to 5,531. For both races, it is true that youth accounted for a large amount of homicides, but if you do the math, most offenders were 25 years and older.
Moreover, no law-abiding community should be stripped of their right to own a firearm because of the heinous acts of a small fraction of our population. Groups like the Huey P. Newton Gun Club realize this fact. This black open-carry group is exercising their right in a way Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t able to decades ago after being denied his concealed carry permit.
Charles C.W. Cooke talked of the history of black gun rights in a great in-depth op-ed for the NYT last year. Unbeknowst to Nanny Bloomberg, blacks have a long, proud history of gun ownership and exercising their right to self-defense to achieve freedom.
At a time when their civil rights are being suppressed by mandatory minimum sentencing, amped up drug charges, civil asset forfeiture, and police brutality, it would behoove ‘social justice’ gun grabbers like Bloomberg to stop stripping away the rights of blacks for their own ‘safety.’ Meanwhile, the “evil” Koch brothers will be leading a fight to expand liberty for minorities with a meaningful criminal justice reform campaign.
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