Damon Root: Why Civil Rights and Gun Rights Are Inseparable

Today’s gun debate
focuses overwhelmingly on the social costs that arise from keeping
and bearing arms. Yet as Senior Editor Damon Root explains in his
review of the new book Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition
of Arms, privately owned guns have also played a profoundly
moral and beneficial role in our society. Indeed, from the time of
Frederick Douglass, who called a “good revolver” the “true remedy
for the Fugitive Slave Bill,” to that of civil rights icon Fannie
Lou Hamer, who braved the worst of 20th century Jim Crow and
declared, “I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom,” armed
self-defense has always gone hand in hand with the fight for racial
equality in America.

View this article.