Gun control’s racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power

[bluestateguy]

I have been saying this for a long time. More gun laws means more powers for the police. Is that really what we want? Who do you think will bear the worst hardship from that? I guarantee you it won't be good ole boy conservative white men.

http://www.salon.com/2015/06/24/gun_controls_racist_reality_the_liberal_argument_against_giving_police_more_power/

Gun control’s racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power

Sincere calls for stricter gun laws are wrong: Without racial justice, it will backfire on minority communities

Alex Gourevitch

The dead are buried, the murderer apprehended, and the shock has started to wear off. Now comes the public reaction to the massacre in Charleston.

Soon after the shootings at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the first black president of the United States offered some thoughts on Dylan Roof’s racist attack. First and foremost, President Obama said, recent events were about how “innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hand on a gun.” The killings were also about a “dark chapter in our history,” namely racial slavery and Jim Crow. Obama only suggested practical action regarding the first issue, namely gun control.

He did not consider that such measures will make the persistence of the second problem even worse.

It is perhaps counterintuitive to say so but gun control responses to mass killings – whether racially motivated or otherwise – are a deep mistake. The standard form of gun control means writing more criminal laws, creating new crimes, and therefore creating more criminals or more reasons for police to suspect people of crimes. More than that, it means creating yet more pretexts for a militarized police, full of racial and class prejudice, to overpolice.

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[beforeiknewbetter]

1. The only thing I guessI can respond is nothing is 100% but

I'm pretty damn sure that less guns in this country would equal less gun deaths.

Police are another matter but we should try to lump gun control and racist police in the same sentence

[Nuclear Unicorn]

2. "I'm pretty damn sure that less guns in this country would equal less gun deaths."

Less gun violence only? What about violence overall?

Police are another matter but we should try to lump gun control and racist police in the same sentence

Should? We absolutely have to. People of color had to arm themselves with WW2 souvenirs in order to protect themselves from the predations of racist police and judges who rode with the KKK.