Illustration by Tom Bachtell

For some years, the N.R.A.’s approach to gun-rights advocacy has amounted to a variant of the old Maoist dictum, to the effect that democracy flows from the barrel of a gun. In March, the group provided a novel twist on the theme of sidearm liberty when it débuted an ad featuring Colion Noir, a young African-American in a low-slung baseball cap, who offered a series of one-liners to explain why he supports gun rights. First among his arguments is the idea that it is absurd for African-Americans to oppose gun access, given the history of racial violence that characterized segregation. Around the time the ad was released, the N.R.A.’s president, David Keene, told an interviewer that African-Americans should recognize that gun-control policy dates back to the attempts to disarm blacks after the Civil War. There’s a neat logic to the N.R.A.’s marketing push: the gun is an essential implement of democracy, so gun rights should appeal to people whose history has been defined by the struggle to achieve civil rights.

Four months after the ad appeared, a Florida jury found George Zimmerman not guilty in the shooting death, last year, of Trayvon Martin. That death was the by-product of a toxic environment of racial profiling, liberal gun access, and self-defense laws—in particular, the controversial Stand Your Ground laws, which originated in Florida, in 2005, and are now on the books in more than twenty states. Speaking at the N.A.A.C.P. convention in Orlando three days after the verdict, Attorney General Eric Holder told of his own experience with racial profiling, and his worries for his fifteen-year-old son. The line that generated the biggest response, however, was his statement that “we must stand our ground to insure that our laws reduce violence, and take a hard look at laws that contribute to more violence than they prevent.” Though Holder didn’t mention the N.R.A., his remarks were an implicit rebuttal to the organization—which has been deeply supportive of Stand Your Ground laws—and to its flawed reading of the past. Holder was addressing a group that is intimately familiar with the type of violence that Colion Noir refers to; some who were present are survivors of it. This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, but it has also been fifty years since the N.A.A.C.P. field secretary Medgar Evers was gunned down outside his home, in Jackson, Mississippi. Thus a civil-rights organization whose history is marked with violent assaults on its membership cheered the suggestion that self-defense laws could be part of the problem.

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The response to Holder’s comments highlights both what has changed in the past half century and what has not. There is a long history of African-American support for gun rights and the principle of armed self-defense. In 1957, after receiving threats of violence, Robert F. Williams armed the N.A.A.C.P. chapter that he led in Monroe, North Carolina. (When the leadership suspended him, he continued his work under the banner of an all-black N.R.A. chapter.) The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee activist Fannie Lou Hamer spoke publicly of the loaded guns that she kept under her bed, and members of organizations like the Deacons for Defense and Justice carried weapons with the goal of protecting civil-rights workers in the South. Even Walter White, who served as the executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. for twenty-six years, often told of sitting with his father, both of them holding rifles, to protect the family home during the 1906 Atlanta race riots. Yet Keene’s argument about African-Americans and gun rights is utterly cynical—a type of historical malpractice. As with the recent anti-abortion billboards that targeted African-Americans by alluding to racist roots in the birth-control movement, the error lies in importing the past wholesale into the present. The point of history is to learn from it, not to proceed as if we were still living in it.

In 2010, African-Americans constituted thirteen per cent of the nation’s population and fifty-five per cent of its homicide victims. During the Zimmerman trial, the defendant’s supporters repeatedly emphasized that the vast majority of black murder victims die at the hands of other African-Americans. This was meant to imply that the focus on the Martin case was at least mildly hypocritical, but it actually explained why campaigns like the N.R.A.’s Colion Noir ad are not effective among African-Americans—why, instead, they are driving a racial gap in gun policy. Today, whites support gun rights over gun control by a margin of nine points. By contrast, African-Americans support gun control over gun rights by a forty-four-point margin. Keene cites the traumatic memories of Jim Crow violence as reason to support gun rights; African-Americans cite the ongoing bloodletting in American cities as reason not to. The section of the population that is most likely to experience gun violence is also most likely to believe that guns are too easily accessible.

Concern that the Zimmerman verdict might encourage vigilantism reminiscent of the ugly past is only part of the reason for the opposition to Stand Your Ground laws. They can also facilitate gang violence: a gang member, by definition, has reason to fear grievous bodily harm. Then there’s the thorny reality that not all self-defense is created equal. A study by the Urban Institute shows that just one per cent of cases in which a black person shoots a white person is ruled justifiable. When the races are reversed, in states without Stand Your Ground laws, that number climbs to 9.5 per cent; in states with such laws, it reaches almost seventeen per cent.

The N.R.A. has done little to ease the disparity. In May, 2012, Marissa Alexander, an African-American from Jacksonville, Florida, attempted to employ a Stand Your Ground defense after firing a “warning shot” during a dispute with her estranged husband, who had a history of domestic violence. (He was not harmed.) The claim was rejected and she was sentenced to twenty years in prison. The Alexander case appears to be precisely the kind of defense that the N.R.A. would support, especially as it strongly advocates guns as a form of self-protection for women, but the group has remained uninvolved.

At the end of last week, President Obama reëntered the discussion, asking, if Trayvon Martin had been of age and armed, “Do we actually think that he would have been justified in shooting Mr. Zimmerman . . . because he felt threatened?” He added that, if the answer is “at least ambiguous,” then “we might want to examine those kinds of laws.” The conflict over Stand Your Ground isn’t simply a matter of race; it’s a matter of differing trajectories in history and their implications in the present. Martin’s parents have established the Trayvon Martin Foundation, with the goals of advocating for the families of crime victims, opposing racial profiling, and promoting nonviolent methods of conflict resolution. The rationale of the N.R.A. is to never bring a knife to a gunfight. The preëminent concern of those most affected by violence is to insure that there is no gunfight in the first place. ♦