Please click the link below to subscribe to a FREE PDF version of each print edition of the Niagara Reporter

http://eepurl.com/dnsYM9

By: Ken Hamilton

Not since 1859 and abolitionist John Brown’s raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia has some American government officials been so vehement in their attempts to keep comparable arms out of the hands of its black citizens.

New York state Governor Andrew Cuomo has on his website a bulletin announcing that members of the Congressional Black Caucus has joined him to encourage the Senate to “… block the confirmation of President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, citing his interpretation of an unlimited Second Amendment.”

“Judge Kavanaugh is President Trump’s latest gift to the NRA,” Cuomo said.  “His past opinions show that Judge Kavanaugh believes that it’s a constitutional right to carry even the most dangerous assault weapons, and as a member of our nation’s highest court he threatens to roll back our gun safety laws and put our communities in danger … In New York, we believe in common sense gun safety and will fight against Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court as we continue lead the way on gun safety. “

Somehow, members of the CBC are seeing the issue of gun control like a film-splicer might, only examining the two pieces of film that he is holding in their hands at the time that he is cutting a movie, taking little note of the big picture importance and good that an armed constituency could do in the prevention of crime.

Even John Brown understood that unless citizens had the means to protect themselves there could be no freedom.  Brown’s raid on the Harper’s Ferry Arsenal was for the purpose of arming then-enslaved Africans so that they could fight for their freedom – this, two years prior to the start of the American Civil War where Lincoln replicated General Washington’s valiant efforts for white American freedom in the War of American Revolution, using comparable arms to thereby gaining freedom from Britain.  Imagine where we would be if the Minute Men at Bunker Hill had no personal comparable weapons when the Red Coats came a-marching.

Equality is one of the tenets that the CBC has on their agenda for the 115^th Congress.  Latest estimates of the privately held arms in the United States range between 270-310 million.  The issue is as it was in the Jim Crow South, a minority of Americans holds these firearms – and that minority isn’t the common African-American citizen.  Therefore, the question that begs to be asked if it is President Trump or the CBC that is aiding the Ku Klux Klan by looking to remove dangerous guns from these representatives’ inner-city conclaves, all the while fighting to keep dangerous citizens right where they are.

I understand both the governor’s and the CBC’s ambitions to make our communities safe; however they cite no example as to where such drastic actions of trying to get dangerous guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals or citizens without the mental capacity to safely and properly use them has ever worked in a laboratory as diverse as our America.

Furthermore, how can the CBC cite a mistrust of the police, even in quickly responding to calls in the inner-city, if they respond at all, and then at the same time want to take away the means for their own inner-city constituents to defend themselves.

The CBC members are largely, if not entirely from the large cities of the country.  Yet their website says that they have a total representation of 78-million constituents with only 17-million (22%) being black; and not all blacks live in the inner-city.  Surely they must understand that the culture of rural areas are quite different than urban ones, and that the disarming of any American’s rights are, as Martin Luther King would be apt to say, the disarming of all American’s rights.

If Trump is gifting the NRA with Kavanaugh, one has to ask , “Are the CBC proponents of non-recognition of the Second Amendment actually gifting the KKK?”

The CBC says that they are voice for the voiceless, but in New York state the obvious voiceless are honest, hardworking New Yorkers, black, white, brown, yellow and red.