This double-barrelled interpretation contributed to centuries of brutality against defenceless black Americans. Ms Anderson recounts a South Carolina militia's grisly response to a slave uprising in 1739 in which the enslaved were "tortured, shot, hanged and gibbeted alive". White militias "made Swiss cheese of [black] men's backs, especially those who had surrendered" during a massacre in Colfax, Louisiana, in 1873. President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the dishonourable discharge of 167 black soldiers in 1906, on the baseless suspicion that some in their ranks had shot whites in Brownsville, Texas.
The emptiness, for black Americans, of the right to bear arms is amply documented in Ms Anderson's vivid retelling. No landmarks of racial progress—neither Reconstruction in the 19th century, nor the civil-rights movement of the 20th—made a difference. Nor has the National Rifle Association (NRA), the zealous defender of gun rights that came to the fore in the 1960s, targeted this prejudice. In 1967 the NRA helped draft a bill in California to disarm the Black Panthers, a black self-defence organisation that "had broken no firearms laws". Ms Anderson notes that the association has been slow to respond to police violence against black men in recent years, including in 2016 when an officer shot and killed Philando Castile in St Paul, Minnesota, after Castile disclosed that he was (legally) carrying a gun.
译文由可可原创,仅供学习交流使用,未经许可请勿转载。