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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29431 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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we can be reasonably confident that the modern 2nd amendment movement centred around a politically-active NRA loosely aligned with movement conservatism was founded by people who thought that gun culture was good because it enabled Jim Crow, not in spite of it.

The NRA was created by Union officials who thought pro-Union forces needed better training. You are describing a Michael Moore-style history which is the opposite of actual history.

The NRA went from being a primarily-sporting group of the type you mention to being a primarily-political one as a result of the Cincinnati revolt. This isn't Michael Moore history - "The NRA leadership was useless until a grassroots takeover put real 2nd amendment supporters into place" is the story gun rights activists tell themselves. The NRA was not a white supremacist organisation either before or after the change, but the new leadership was dominated by Southern conservatives, and the vast majority of Southern conservatives in the 1970's were white supremacists by modern standards. "Jim Crow is protected by states' rights under the Constitution", "Civil Rights law is an unconstitutional expansion of federal power", and "Reconstruction was an abuse of power by carpetbaggers and scallywags" were all standard Southern conservative positions at the time, and "Jim Crow is good actually" was still within the Overton window.

The NRA went from being a primarily-sporting group of the type you mention to being a primarily-political one as a result of the Cincinnati revolt.

Yes. And the 1977 Cincinnati revolt was a result of the Gun Control Act of 1968. Which itself was AFTER the end of Jim Crow.

I presume that if you had evidence that the actual leaders of the NRA following said revolt were supporters of Jim Crow, you'd have posted it.

I presume that if you had evidence that the actual leaders of the NRA following said revolt were supporters of Jim Crow, you'd have posted it.

The fact that they were Southern conservatives is Bayesian evidence that were supporters of Jim Crow, given that the vast majority of Southern conservatives born before the civil rights era were supporters of Jim Crow. The racist murder that Harlon Carter was convicted of was of a Hispanic, so it is definitely possible that he wasn't shockingly racist against blacks, just unlikely.

In any case the claim I was trying to make was the slightly weaker claim that the leaders of the Cincinnati revolt were people who accepted the moral assumptions of the Dunning School of history (which would have been taught as uncontroversial fact in the high schools and colleges they attended) and would therefore have seen the 1st Klan as an example of righteous-but-doomed resistance to tyranny and the Redemption-era white militias as a good example of successful resistance. The set of people who thought that the 1st Klan were the goodies in Birth of a Nation (which was not small - the movie enjoyed mainstream success) is much larger than the set of people who were actively working to bring back Jim Crow in 1977. The Sons of Confederate Veterans gave Nathan Bedford Forrest a posthumous honour in 1977, so "the 1st Klan were the goodies" was still comfortably within the Overton window at the time.

I am happy to admit that I have no evidence whatsoever that Neal Knox was a segregationist apart from the fact that it was normal for white Texans who attended segregated Christian colleges in the 1950's to be segregationists.

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The fact that they were Southern conservatives is Bayesian evidence that were supporters of Jim Crow, given that the vast majority of Southern conservatives born before the civil rights era were supporters of Jim Crow.

OK, so you don't actually have evidence that the particular people involved supported Jim Crow. You just want to use the word "Bayesian" to justify your stereotyping. Your intimation that Carter and Knox were supporters of the Klan (any Klan) is, I presume, similarly supported, and comes down to "they were Texans".

The racist murder that Harlon Carter was convicted of was of a Hispanic, so it is definitely possible that he wasn't shockingly racist against blacks, just unlikely.

He wasn't convicted of having racist motivations in the killing, and his conviction was overturned on the grounds that the jury was not adequately instructed on the law of self-defense.

And the NRAs turn to politics began with the Gun Control Act of 1968 (which the NRA did not object to, resulting ultimately in the replacement of NRA leadership). Rather later than the abolition of Jim Crow. Earlier gun control laws were often intended to disarm blacks.

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