Exercising the Right
Tell Us How You Really Feel
Sometimes an anti-gun leftist will say something so outrageous that the comment itself becomes newsworthy. Mark Finkelstein, writing at Newsbusters.org on November 6, reported about an incident in which a far-left journalist, who was a guest on MSNBC, said something completely asinine. The guest journalist was Elie Mystal, the “justice correspondent” for the magazine The Nation, which promotes itself as a progressive publication. Mystal was commenting on matters related to the courts when he made an odd statement that seemed to imply that the white working-class voters who support the Republican Party are actually most interested in getting away with the cold-blooded murder of black people.
The statement started with Mystal dismissing the notion that the white working class is interested in “kitchen-table issues, like infrastructure and pipes and how many gallons of milk you can put on the table.” Mystal said that the real major issue for the “white non-college-educated voter” is the ability to shoot black people and get away with it. “I contend that what [the white working class] care about is using their guns on black people and getting away with it. That’s what they want. That’s what they actually are in it for.”
What Mystal omitted from his analysis was the desire of the white working class to be armed to defend themselves from criminals. If what Mystal actually meant was that working-class whites are very much interested in being able to engage in justified self-defense and not be prosecuted for doing so, then most gun owners would agree. But it seems as if Mystal believes white gun owners want to kill black people even if said black people are not committing violent felonies. Anyone familiar with American gun owners knows that is definitely not the case. Mystal might be surprised to learn that gun owners are not all white people. The National African American Gun Association (NAAGA), which was founded only six years ago, now has 75 active chapters and 30,000 members. A firearm trade association reported that the 2020 surge in gun sales included the largest firearm sales increase among “Black men and women, who show a 58.2 percent increase in purchases during the first six months of 2020” over the prior year.
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