What happened to Tank Man, China's most famous Tiananmen ...

Interesting article, and I recall the Bellesisles affair.

I'm not a historian, but he seems to be on solid ground when he's discussing history. However, when he tries to turn the corner, as it were, and show his argument's modern application, he falls apart, IMO.

His principal fallacy is this: Gun control laws, like many others, were used to keep blacks subjugated. The point was to keep blacks unarmed while keeping whites armed. Having whites armed and blacks unarmed was not a form of gun control; it was a way to control blacks. And other laws were used in the same way. These legislators had no interest in controlling guns. They wanted to control blacks. This entire notion goes away when "gun control"-- let's say licensing--is applied across the board.

Cramer recognizes this problem with his argument, and you can see him squirm around trying to solve it. So he has to jump to a maximalist position: That gun control laws, including licensing, are simply ways to disarm the populace. Here's where he turns the corner and ends up in absurdity...

"One concern is that the motivations for disarming blacks in the past are really not so different from the motivations for disarming law-abiding citizens today. In the last century, the official rhetoric in support of such laws was that "they" were too violent, too untrustworthy, to be allowed weapons. Today, the same elitist rhetoric regards law-abiding Americans in the same way, as child-like creatures in need of guidance from the government."

First, as he notes in the historical section of his article, blacks were simply not allowed to own or carry guns. There is simply no relationship between this and requiring all gun owners to register. None. And picturing gun owners who register their guns as "child-like creatures" is silly. You might as well say that everyone lined up at the DMV to get tags for their cars is a child-like creature.

Edit to add: Second, and this should have been first, the motivations were not. at. all. the same. In the first instance, the motivation was to keep blacks under their thumb. Today, the motivation is to reduce the gun violence that in fact exists. There's no hazy speculation about people being too violent or untrustworthy; there's a recognition that there's too much gun violence.

Then comes the economic argument. Gun control was a way to keep blacks economically subjugated, and its purpose today is to keep everyone subjugated.

In the last century, while never openly admitted, one of the goals of disarming blacks was to make them more willing to accept various forms of economic oppression, including the sharecropping system, in which free blacks were reduced to an economic state not dramatically superior to the conditions of slavery.

In the seventeenth century, the aristocratic power structure of colonial Virginia found itself confronting a similar challenge from lower class whites. These poor whites resented how the men who controlled the government used that power to concentrate wealth into a small number of hands. These wealthy feeders at the government trough would have disarmed poor whites if they could, but the threat of both Indian and pirate attack made this impractical; for all white men "were armed and had to be armed..." Instead, blacks, who had occupied a poorly defined status between indentured servant and slave, were reduced to hereditary chattel slavery, so that poor whites could be economically advantaged, without the upper class having to give up its privileges. [37]

Do you see what he does here? Again, he's trying to jump from racists laws used to subjugate blacks to gun control laws used to subjugate everyone. And to make this jump he says, "the wealthy...would have disarmed poor whites if they could, but the threat of attack made it impractical."

Well, apparently, depriving poor whites of their guns was not necessary to keeping them subjugated economically. They were happy to fight Indians and eat the gentry's dust. He understands this problem, so he skips back to gun-deprived blacks whom poor whites control at the point of a gun in order to gain economic advantages for themselves without having to threaten the even greater privileges of the upper class.

But what the heck happened to those restless whites champing at the bit to overthrow the foul economic regime? They step higher by stepping on the black man's back. But that was happening anyway, right? The leftist dream was to bring poor whites and blacks together in a shared class consciousness to fight "the man." But was it true that the poor whites and blacks were on the verge of "getting together?" They kept guns away from blacks as they always had, and they did not keep guns away from whites. This was not gun control; it was control of blacks by a white population that was generally racist, rich and poor.

Then he continues with the "when did you stop beating your wife" argument...

Today, the forces that push for gun control seem to be heavily (though not exclusively) allied with political factions that are committed to dramatic increases in taxation on the middle class. While it would be hyperbole to compare higher taxes on the middle class to the suffering and deprivation of sharecropping or slavery, the analogy of disarming those whom you wish to economically disadvantage, has a certain worrisome validity to it.

He KNOWS it's utterly buffoonish to equate raising taxes to sharecropping or slavery and makes a point of disassociating himself from the equation--but then makes it anyway by saying that the equation he's just disavowed has a "certain worrisome validity to it." What validity?

Then on to "suspect categories."

Another point to consider is that in the American legal system, certain classifications of governmental discrimination are considered constitutionally suspect, and these "suspect classifications" (usually considered to be race and religion) come to a court hearing under a strong presumption of invalidity. The reason for these "suspect classifications" is because of the long history of governmental discrimination based on these classifications, and because these classifications often impinge on fundamental rights. [38]

In much the same way, gun control has historically been a tool of racism, and associated with racist attitudes about black violence. Similarly, many gun control laws impinge on that most fundamental of rights: self-defense. Racism is so intimately tied to the history of gun control in America that we should regard gun control aimed at law-abiding people as a "suspect idea," and require that the courts use the same demanding standards when reviewing the constitutionality of a gun control law, that they would use with respect to a law that discriminated based on race.

First of all, gun control is not a "suspect category" like race, gender, or religion. It's not even the same type of thing. Race, gender, and religion inhere in people. They are traits or beliefs. Gun control is none of those things. The fact that blacks were controlled by lethal force isn't news; that control quite obviously depended on depriving blacks of lethal force. And? This is almost like saying that Roman galley slaves used oars, therefore using oars to row a boat harkens back to slavery. You become slave-like when you pick up an oar.

Here's maybe a better analogy: The practice of redlining. Keeping blacks out of certain neighborhoods. You could call it a perverse kind of zoning. However, getting rid of redlining didn't mean that the practice of zoning per se became a "suspect category" and isn't one that serves people of all colors when applied across the board. When you do away with redlining, you don't really want to do away with zoning, even though redlining was an informal, maybe formal, form of zoning that used to oppress certain groups of people. The rules of real estate kept Jews out of New Canaan when my parents moved to CT, but getting rid of that rule with a sordid past didn't mean folks, including Jews, wanted to get rid of all rules, e.g., the two-acre zoning requirement.

Non sequitur obfuscation. There's no proof that if African Americans had guns they could have successfully defended themselves against the overwhelming numerical advantage of the whites who were also armed. No matter how many guns a group has it will not offset the numerical advantage of a larger group of well armed attackers. I suspect that after winning the gun battle the whites would have been so pissed even more African Americans would have been killed.

Please explain exactly how you think using AR-15's and fighting back against police abuse during the Selma to Montgomery marches would have advanced the cause of civil rights for African Americans.

What does this guy think? That if the Civil Rights Act is repealed, blacks will be able to protect themselves against re-segregationist moves...with guns? Doesn't he know that all those racist whites who are doing things like making it harder to vote right now ALSO have a deep attachment to their firearms? And when the two sides battle it out, who's going to win, do you think?

Game this out for me? How is this supposed to work, exactly?

How might we account for the seemingly large-scale support for measures restricting access to firearms among African-Americans, particularly black political leaders? The irony is clear. A segment of the American population that has, historically and indeed in modern times, been all too frequently unable to rely on the state for protection has produced a political leadership that can usually be relied on to support measures that at the end of the day will limit the right of self-defense for its constituents.

Maybe because...

• Right now, there is no shortage of guns in the ghetto and easy access, and no one's being protected by it. Folks are getting killed by all them guns.

• If all them guns already in the ghetto are killing ghetto residents, then how does adding more guns to that situation portend fewer deaths?

Again, game this out for me...

At this point, the only purpose of the 2nd Amendment is to make gun manufacturers rich. It certainly isn't keeping anyone safe from harm or tyranny. Nor are all the guns in the ghetto keeping black people safe from harm, as those two black scholars argue.