When the unarmed Trayvon Martin was shot by gun-carrying vigilante George Zimmerman, there were approximately zero voices from the Republican/Right Wing/NRA crowd bemoaning “if only this poor young man had been carrying a gun then this whole tragedy could have been avoided.” Instead, seemingly every gun-toting American Patriot cast his lot with the light-skinned guy who did the shooting.
Make no mistake, when the Republican Party and NRA talk about making sure Americans can buy guns to protect themselves, they’re not thinking “if only poor black people had more weapons then we’d all be safer.”
I would say (replying to the thread topic, and violating Betteridge’s law) yes.
I believe the Deacons kept Martin Luther King’s pacifist movement from being rolled over during the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s. MLK would have ended up in an unmarked bayou without the Deacons.
Generally, across all times and cultures, access to powerful means of self defense is far more important for identifiable minorities than for people who can “pass”.
But the question becomes one of whether you think access to guns is good for people, or not. Advocates of citizen disarmament - who can be seen as either righteous people of peace or pawns of totalitarianism, without any contradiction - might say that any access to weapons is destructive. I disagree with that, so I think Republican policies that favor less gun regulation are beneficial to both oppressed peoples and to distinguishable minorities.
Edit: and yet another question is whether gun regulation is good for societies (as opposed to individuals or subgroups) and if so what kind of regulation. My post ignores those issues.
