Gun-People Play the Race Card to the Supreme Court

We are talking professional race-card playing here.

In March, the Supreme Court will hear arguments for why local governments should not enact gun control laws that infringe on the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms. The lead case the high-court will consider is that of Otis McDonald, a 76 year-old Black man from the Morgan Parks section of Chicago, who is suing the city because he says he needs a gun to defend himself in his crime-infested neighborhood. However, McDonald’s lawyers are not arguing the 2nd Amendment, as the National Rifle Association would hope, but rather a violation of 14th Amendment, whereby constitutionally backed "privileges and immunities” offered the citizenry of (several) states are denied in another state.

The NRA is a respondent and supporter of the petitioner, Mr. McDonald, but it seems like they agree more with Mr. McDonald’s skin color, than with his argument for why he should get his gun. In fact, McDonald lawyer, Alan Gura, and the NRA do not agree upon which Amendment battle to hang their respective hats. But what they do both seem to agree upon is the promise that changing the gun advocacy argument from one of rural, conservative, White males onto the plight of an aging Black man, is a winner. So who, I ask, is playing the race card in McDonald v. Chicago?

Some full-metal jacket spin-doctors are even going so far as to liken Mr. McDonald’s plight to that of freed slaves whose rights as new citizens were protected from similar attempts to block individual states from passing laws to selectively strip them of constitutional rights, particularly gun ownership. Other charlatans have the nerve to compare this strategy to Thurgood Marshall’s approach in Brown v. Topeka Kansas (Board of Education). BS! Finding a compelling, sympathetic example of a wrong, as Marshall did, within a similar offended group is quite different than slight-of-hand re-framing of an argument across demographic lines, to play on the racial and political sensitivities of the justices and the public.

As much as I feel for Mr. McDonald’s desire to protect himself in his home, I cannot sanction this trickery in order that more White men (and women) can strap on 9 millimeters to watch their kids play soccer, or buy legal AK-47’s for ‘sport hunting’, or running around the woods target shooting in preparation for an upcoming race war. The number of potential fatal accidents involving registered guns in dense urban places far outweighs the approach of arming everyone to the teeth. I don't like it, but McDonald should stash his unregistered shotgun at the ready, knowing that no jury will ever convict him of ridding the world on one more B&E thug operating beyond the law. And honestly, he stands a bigger statistical chance of having the weapon used against him, rather than protecting him.

James C. Collier

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