Gun Owners, Segregationists, and Jim Sleeper

[Draggingtree]

National Review:

Gun Owners, Segregationists, and Jim Sleeper

By Charles C. W. Cooke

December 18, 2012 6:02 P.M.

Jim Sleeper, a “lecturer in political science” at Yale, wrote the following in today’s Huffington Post:

The astonishing “new normal” of heavy gunfire that took hold in Newtown long before last week’s massacre only reinforces the parallel I drew here last week between today’s gun enthusiasts and yesterday’s racial segregationists.

his article, because anybody who bothers to look up 1857′s Dred Scott v. Sandford decision will notice right away the court’s awful observation that if slaves were permitted to enjoy full citizenship rights, then they would — shock horror! — enjoy the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” This, the court thought, would be disastrous.

The fear of blacks with guns is not, of course, new. The very first gun-control measures in American history were designed to keep arms out of the hands of blacks and Indians: The Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies both prohibited the sale of guns to Indians in the early seventeenth century, and the “Black Codes” of the mid-eighteenth century