"With the bombings came marauding groups of armed white vigilantes called “nightriders” who drove through black neighbourhoods shooting and starting fires. John Rice and his neighbours guarded the streets at night with shotguns.
The memory of her father out on patrol lies behind Rice’s opposition to gun control today. Had those guns been registered, she argues, Bull Connor would have had a legal right to take them away, thereby removing one of the black community’s only means of defence. “I have a sort of pure second amendment view of the right to bear arms,” she said in 2001."
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There is so much here it is impossible to do it justice. But I will single out that passage for remarking on. Not many people know about the southern segregationist gun laws or the role that privatly held firearms played in the Civil Rights struggle. Contrary to liberal mythology the gandhi approach was NOT the working model when it came to self-defence from racist violence.
"Political power comes from the barrel of a gun." Mao Zedong