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Search on Google for "white supremacy" and "gun rights" and you'll see plenty of articles claiming the Second Amendment is a tool for white America. But a new paper from Clemson University economists Michael Makowsky and Patrick Warren finds the opposite is true. They say gun ownership helped black Americans defend themselves when no one else would.
The key finding of "Firearms and Lynching" is clear: "Rates of Black lynching decreased with greater Black firearm access" in the Jim Crow South.
In other words, when black Americans couldn't count on the cops to protect them, guns made a difference. A few years ago, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke to this on ABC's "The View." She related a personal anecdote from her childhood in Birmingham, Ala., to explain her appreciation for the Second Amendment.
"There was no way that Bull Connor and the Birmingham Police were going to protect you," she said. "And so when White Knight Riders would come through our neighborhood my father and his friends would take their guns and they'd go to the head of the neighborhood, it's a little cul-de-sac, and they would fire in the air, if anybody came through.
"I don't think they actually ever hit anybody. But they protected the neighborhood. And I'm sure if Bull Connor had known where those guns were he would have rounded them up."
The study confirms Ms. Rice's point. Messrs. Makowsky and Warren take the data about lynching, and they use the percentage of gun-related suicides as a proxy for firearm access. One key point is that there was a determined effort by the Jim Crow South to disarm black Americans. The authors note that while the laws such as pistol bans may not have explicitly targeted blacks, that was the clear intent—and it was carried out by selective enforcement.
Unarmed people are vulnerable. But if someone can shoot back, even a bigoted mob is going to think twice. More black Americans today are absorbing this lesson about self-defense if their gun purchases are any indication. Overall gun sales are way up in the U.S., but a National Shooting Sports Foundation survey for the first six months of 2020 reports sales to black Americans were up 58% over a year earlier.
Second Amendment rights for black Americans were often deliberately limited by local and state governments that, the authors say, were "rarely better than indifferent to their safety and, at their worst, actively supportive of terrorist violence targeting them."
All the more reason to ensure all Americans are able to enjoy this constitutional right. When the police no longer can guarantee public safety, as we see every day in too many American cities, a gun may be the only way for people to protect themselves.
www.wsj.com
The key finding of "Firearms and Lynching" is clear: "Rates of Black lynching decreased with greater Black firearm access" in the Jim Crow South.
In other words, when black Americans couldn't count on the cops to protect them, guns made a difference. A few years ago, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice spoke to this on ABC's "The View." She related a personal anecdote from her childhood in Birmingham, Ala., to explain her appreciation for the Second Amendment.
"There was no way that Bull Connor and the Birmingham Police were going to protect you," she said. "And so when White Knight Riders would come through our neighborhood my father and his friends would take their guns and they'd go to the head of the neighborhood, it's a little cul-de-sac, and they would fire in the air, if anybody came through.
"I don't think they actually ever hit anybody. But they protected the neighborhood. And I'm sure if Bull Connor had known where those guns were he would have rounded them up."
The study confirms Ms. Rice's point. Messrs. Makowsky and Warren take the data about lynching, and they use the percentage of gun-related suicides as a proxy for firearm access. One key point is that there was a determined effort by the Jim Crow South to disarm black Americans. The authors note that while the laws such as pistol bans may not have explicitly targeted blacks, that was the clear intent—and it was carried out by selective enforcement.
Unarmed people are vulnerable. But if someone can shoot back, even a bigoted mob is going to think twice. More black Americans today are absorbing this lesson about self-defense if their gun purchases are any indication. Overall gun sales are way up in the U.S., but a National Shooting Sports Foundation survey for the first six months of 2020 reports sales to black Americans were up 58% over a year earlier.
Second Amendment rights for black Americans were often deliberately limited by local and state governments that, the authors say, were "rarely better than indifferent to their safety and, at their worst, actively supportive of terrorist violence targeting them."
All the more reason to ensure all Americans are able to enjoy this constitutional right. When the police no longer can guarantee public safety, as we see every day in too many American cities, a gun may be the only way for people to protect themselves.
Opinion | Firing Back at Jim Crow
A new study shows how guns helped blacks against lynch mobs.
www.wsj.com
