When we voted on cc in MO st Louis area voted overwhelmingly against it. I only feel the need to cc when I go to that h311 hole.
From John (Unintended Consequences) Ross' column near that time:
A black businessman (who was one of the handful of St.
Louis city residents who voted for the referendum) and I
were discussing the recent passage of RTC. I brought up the
referendum results, and said I could not understand why
blacks had been so uniformly against the measure. The
proposal was a "shall issue" one, where if you satisfied
the requirements (training, fingerprints, no criminal
record, no mental illness, etc.) you couldn’t be denied
the permit just because the sheriff didn’t like the idea
of people besides the police having guns. The businessman
stared at me.
"I thought you were good at math," he said. I allowed
as to how I felt that I was. "Then you must never have
taken Statistics and Probability." I told him I had done
this also, and that it had been one of the most rewarding
math classes I had ever taken (and incidentally was taught
by Amherst’s professor Denton, who is black.) "Then you
must be cowed enough by political correctness to never
think of applying statistics and probability to anything
involving race." Finally I admitted that this last
accusation might be true.
"Then I am going to ask you two true-or-false
questions. One: Do blacks in the city of St. Louis have
large extended families?" I answered in the affirmative.
"Two: Is it true that in St. Louis, over 40% of the black
males between the ages of 17 and 25 have criminal
records?" I told him that was also true, unfortunately.
"So here is the important question: What are the
chances of a black person of voting age in St. Louis
having at least one relative with a criminal record?
Assume we define ‘relative’ broadly, to include the young
men who father the children of our female relatives,
whether married to them or not." He sat there waiting for
my answer.
"Are we talking fathers, stepfathers, uncles, brothers,
stepbrothers, male cousins, sons, stepsons, nephews,
mothers’ boyfriends, aunts' boyfriends, sisters’
boyfriends, daughters’ boyfriends, stepdaughters’
boyfriends, female cousins’ boyfriends, nieces’
boyfriends, as well as anyone actually married to a female
relative?" I asked. He nodded. "Then I’d say there's
nearly 100% probability that at least one relative would
have a criminal record." He smiled at me like a teacher who
has just gotten the right answer from one of his slower
students.
"So," I said, "I'm to believe that the black sentiment
in St. Louis was ‘I wish young Tyrone would stop robbing
people, but I don’t want one of the people he robs to
shoot him dead.’ Is that it?" I asked.
"You’ve got it exactly," he told me.
"But why? I mean, honestly, if some guy was married to
my cousin and mugged people for a living, I’d figure he
was making his own choices and could damn well take the
chance of being blasted. I wouldn’t vote away my rights to
help his sorry ass."
"What if it wasn’t just your one cousin’s husband, but
40% of all your male relatives between the ages of 18 and
25? What if that was, oh, I don’t know, a dozen people?"
Suddenly I didn’t know what to say.
"You don’t feel that way," I said finally.
"I’m an Uncle Tom. I’ve recently come to realize that I
now have very few black friends."
This statement filled me with an ineffable sadness. I
know that we will get Right-To-Carry here in Missouri,
even if the Governor vetoes it. That’s not the issue. And
every black Missourian with a criminal record isn’t going
to get shot by an armed citizen—we all know that, too.
In over 98%** of the cases where a licenseholder
encounters a criminal, he stops the crime without firing
a shot. It’s that way in Atlanta and every other big city
with a large black population in a Right-To-Carry state,
so there’s no reason to think it would be any different in
Kansas City or St. Louis.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070706054607/http://www.john-ross.net/race&rtc.htm
(Link may be "hinky" because his early stuff is only available on the wayback machine.)