Condi: Why I Support the Second Amendment
Secretary of State nominee Dr. Condoleezza Rice is a big supporter of the
second amendment, a commitment cultivated during her days growing up in
Bull Conner's Birmingham, Alabama, when the shotgun wielded by her father
was often the only thing that stood between her family and the Ku Klux
Klan.
In 1963, racial violence was "turning her hometown into 'Bombingham' as
Alabama’s governor George Wallace fought a federal court order to
integrate the city’s schools," writes Rice biographer Antonia Felix.
In excerpts of her book "The Condoleezza Rice Story," reprinted in the
London Sunday Times, Felix recounts:
"With the bombings came marauding groups of armed white vigilantes called
'nightriders,' who drove through black neighborhoods shooting and starting
fires. [Condi's father] John Rice and his neighbors 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 ofthe
black community’s only means of defense."
"I have a sort of pure second amendment view of the right to bear arms,"
said the future Secretary of State.