It’s ridiculous how often the radical left claims that something is racist as a way to explain inconsistencies in outcomes, to deflect criticism, or just because they’ve gotten so used to doing it that pretty much everything is racist in their eyes.
But, as Tom Knighton at our sister site Bearing Arms points out, the Everything is Racist™ Left has turned a blind eye to the racist origins of gun control.
“You see, early gun control efforts were about keeping firearms out of the hands of black people. The first laws were pretty explicit, but following the Civil War, the laws were more circumspect,” he writes. “They didn’t specify black men and women, but everyone knew how they’d be selectively enforced.”
Gun control isn’t just historically racist; by the left’s own standards, modern gun control laws are as well, including The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which Joe Biden recently signed into law. How so? According to scholar Brian Pitman, the bill “outlines how the federal government will provide states with grant money to encourage them to make juvenile records and mental health history as part of the review process for 18- to 21-year-olds who want to purchase a firearm,” and he notes that black and indigenous children “have long been more likely to be labeled as ‘delinquent’ than white children.”
You don’t have to believe that these racial disparities are genuinely the result of racism to acknowledge that the radical left has made far weaker arguments to decree something as racist.
For example, in February, Stacey Abrams claimed that criticism of her maskless photo with masked school children was racist. MSNBC’s Joy Reid claimed in March that coverage of the Ukraine war was racist. Math is even considered racist in California — don’t ask why; it doesn’t matter because it’s so absurd. The critical thing to take away from this is that the radical left is very quick to deem something as racist, yet, when it comes to gun control, all we get is silence. No lectures about gun control being rooted in racism or long, convoluted explanations for how enforcement of current laws disproportionately impacts minorities — especially concerning the enforcement of red flag laws.
“Another key part of [The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act] that is ripe for racist enforcement is the $750 million to provide assistance to states in implementing red flag laws, mental health courts, drug courts, and ‘crisis intervention programs,'” explains Pitman. “First, these so-called ‘problem-solving courts’, like drug and mental health courts, are ineffective in curbing drug use and mental health, but effective in expanding the overall power of the racist criminal legal system.”
According to Pitman, “red flag laws operate like search and arrest warrants, where an officer presents evidence to a judge who signs (or refuses to sign) the warrant. The criminal legal system has a long history of equating ‘dangerousness’ with being Black, thus one could hypothesize that this will have racially disparate outcomes.”
But the left can’t muster the ability to deem the legislation racist. Why is that? The simple answer is that leftists just don’t like guns, and their antipathy for firearms trumps any moral problems with the law. However, this tells us that the barrage of accusations about people or things being “racist” has nothing to do with racism at all. Instead, it’s about the left falsely assuming a moral high ground in order to achieve its political objectives.
