Berg’s Seventh Law – “When a progressive issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives ethics, character, humanity or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds” – has been getting a workout lately.
But this next bit – an LATimes response to last week’s Bruen decision at the Supreme Court – may be heading to the Berg’s Seventh Law Hall of Fame. [1]
I’ll let the Times own words do the talking:
Is “California” “ready”? Well, the state’s government clearly isn’t:
California Democrats are scrambling to craft and enact new legislation this week that would somehow salvage the requirement — assuming local law enforcement continues to enforce it — that residents get a permit before carrying a concealed weapon. Current law forces gun owners to show “good cause” for needing such a permit, and that is now unconstitutional.
And they can’t talk about the issue without a certain amount of gaslighting:
Nathan W. Jones leads the Bay Area chapter of the Black Gun Owners Assn. But until a few years ago, he wasn’t even into guns…on Thursday, while many were apoplectic over the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the rights of gun owners to carry a loaded weapon in public — throwing gun control laws in California and New York into limbo at a time when shootings are increasing — Jones was thoughtful.
On the one hand, he wants it to be easy for law-abiding citizens to be able to defend themselves “if and when the time arises.” But on the other hand, he’s a 50-year-old realist who knows that fear and hatred of Black people run deep in the United States, especially when we’re armed.
And this is based on…?
“There’s no overt racism when we go to the gun range, but we know how people are looking at us,” Jones said of the dozens of Black members who meet up to go shooting. “We know the things that people think.”
So, gaslighting it is. “We know what you’re really thinking?” Every signficant pro-2nd-Amendment group, at the national and federal levels, have welcomed the surge in black gun owners – whatever their reasons for joining the tribe.
The writer, Erika D. Smith, is certainly impressively ignorant on the substance of the issue:
And the other, truly weird thing is that race is now actually being used as an argument in support of loosening gun laws
Justice Clarence Thomas, in his opinion for the Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Bruen case, waxed philosophical about how the right to bear arms was crucial for the self-protection of Black people in the South during Reconstruction.
And how in 1868, Congress “reaffirmed that freedmen were entitled to the ‘full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty [and] personal security … including the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.’”
Meanwhile, a coalition of progressive organizations, including the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, the Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defender Services, filed an amicus brief in the case, urging the Supreme Court to rule exactly as it did.
Their argument? That gun control laws in New York, like California, disproportionately harm Black and Latino people who carry guns for self-defense. They complained of clients who have been “stopped, questioned, and frisked,” and deprived of their livelihoods because they “exercised a constitutional right.”
“We represent hundreds of indigent people whom New York criminally charges for exercising their right to keep and bear arms,” they wrote. “For our clients, New York’s licensing requirement renders the Second Amendment a legal fiction.”
Smith – and the white LA progressives who edit and publish the LATimes who greenlit Smith’s piece – seem almost amazed to notice the one real thing that the gaslighting just can not deflect from:
But the governor and lawmakers could fail in their efforts, and the Supreme Court’s ruling could stand. And then, California could be forced to confront a reality that has long made many self-proclaimed liberals uncomfortable: Black people — potentially a lot of us — legally carrying guns in public.
Dig beneath the ongoing, lazy slander of all white America, and the McCarthyistic “white supremacists under every rock” rhetoric that’s become background noise in most “progressive’ writing; that’s the real fear. The only thing a white progressive fears, and needs to control, more than a black person is an armed black person.
And when they become armed, and realize that the honky at the range isn’t the problem…
[1] Note to Self: Create a Berg’s Seventh Law Hall of Fame.
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