Writing at The New York Times, Charles C.W. Cooke offers a nice history of the central role that armed self-defense has played in both the civil rights movement and the broader struggle for racial equality. "For centuries," he writes, "firearms have been indispensable to black liberation: as crucial a defense against tyranny for Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. as for Sam Adams and George Washington." Cooke is correct: Civil rights and gun rights are inseparable.

Cooke, whose day job is writing for National Review, also offers some excellent advice to his fellow conservatives at the National Rifle Association: