More Fake News On NRA And Race

An anti-NRA feature story posted last weekend at salon.com is so devoid of logic and fact that it’s hard to even know where to begin in discussing it.

Titled “6 gun groups that aren’t for white right-wingers,” the author, Kali Holloway, attempts to talk about some pro-gun groups that apparently aren’t “like” the National Rifle Association. But before getting to her rundown of such groups, she shows her blatant lack of understanding of law-abiding gun owners and the NRA in more ways than one, turning her reporting into just another example of fake news.

Note first that Holloway is listed as the “associate editor of media and culture” for AlterNet, if that tells you anything. By looking at her past writings, it looks like she is attempting to make a living solely by race-baiting and ruthlessly trashing the Trump administration.

In this case, she bases her entire feature on one big lie—that the NRA is a racist organization.

First, Holloway might benefit from a short primer on the racist roots of the gun control movement. As frequent America’s 1st Freedom contributor Dave Kopel pointed out in a 2015 feature, the desire to keep freed blacks from exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms led to many of our nation’s early gun control laws—the very types of laws that NRA continues to fight against today.

Additionally, as Kopel and associate Joseph Greenlee explained in a recent feature at thehill.com, firearms have historically protected Americans from white supremacists. In fact, private firearm ownership largely made possible the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion in the 2010 McDonald v. Chicago explicated the history of gun control as race control,” wrote Kopel and Greenlee. “Historically, people of color in the United States have often had to depend on themselves for protection. Sometimes the reason is not overt hostility by the government, but instead the incapability of government to secure public safety, as in Chicago today.”

Whether Holloway wants to admit it or not, when NRA fights against restrictive gun laws, or increased firearm taxes, or increased carry permit fees that disproportionately affect those with lower incomes living in inner cities, the organization is largely fighting for the right of minorities to keep and bear arms. Does that sound like a racist organization?

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