The NRA’s Flip Flop on African Americans
Natasha Lennard, Salon, March 3, 2013
When the gun control debate focused around black militants taking up arms, the fulcrums were very different. Indeed, both the NRA and President Ronald Reagan spoke against armed citizens when African American men patrolled neighborhoods brandishing firearms in response to racial violence. The Panthers were not the “well-regulated militia” that the white, conservative stalwarts of Second Amendment advocacy had in mind.
Hence the hypocrisy now of the gun group appealing to African Americans — invoking the Civil Rights movement — to lobby support against gun regulation. The NRA hired Internet star and gun advocate Colion Noir to feature in a video, posted on YouTube Friday, to appeal to the black community. {snip}
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{snip} But what Noir’s monologue helpfully forgets is that when it came to black men taking up arms in the Civil Rights struggle, the NRA was on the other side of the gun control fence too.
Watch Colion Noir’s NRA appeal:
