Why Malcolm X Is a Second Amendment Hero

Writing at The New York Times, Charles C.W. Cooke
offers a nice history of the central role that armed self-defense
has played in both the civil rights movement and the broader
struggle for racial equality. “For centuries,”
he writes, “firearms have been indispensable to black
liberation: as crucial a defense against tyranny for Frederick
Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. as for Sam Adams and George
Washington.” Cooke is correct:
Civil rights and gun rights are inseparable.

Cooke, whose day job is writing for National Review,
also offers some excellent advice to his fellow conservatives at
the National Rifle Association:

It is one thing for the N.R.A. to celebrate black
Second Amendment advocates such as its spokesman Colion Noir, and
Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. of Milwaukee County, but it is quite
another for Wayne LaPierre to inveigh against “home invaders, drug
cartels, carjackers, knockout gamers, and rapers, and haters,” and
for the camera to then pan around a sea of white faces clapping in
unison.

Malcolm X may have a deservedly mixed reputation, but the famous
photograph of him standing at the window, rifle in hand, insisting
on black liberation “by any means necessary,” is about as American
as it gets. It should be celebrated just like the “Don’t tread on
me” Gadsden flag. By not making that connection, the movement is
losing touch with one of its greatest triumphs and forsaking a
prime illustration of why its cause is so just and so crucial.

If supporters of the right to keep and bear arms want their
pleas to be heard in their proper context, they might consider
talking a little less about Valley Forge and a little more about
Jim Crow — and attempting to fill their ranks with people who have
known much more recently what tyranny really looks like.