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Hey rightwing gun nuts - arming slave victims would not have freed them because the gun trade actually fueled the slave trade

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EPR-radar1/19/2013 6:10:19 pm PST

re: #6 The Ghost of a Flea

Very much the same kind of retaliatory violence was used in the US South whenever there was a violent incident involving an escaping slave. Each slave rebellion results in an orgy of arbitrary violence against both free and enslaved blacks. And not just shootings and lynchings: rape and elaborate public torture were commonplace.

To look at the history of slavery and say “if they just had guns” is insanely insulting to the people that survived in those conditions. It’s a shallow fantasy of violence as panacea, with no reflection on the deeper context…which is unfortunately a consistent theme of many of these loud “we need guns for freedom” people.

These points were also valid in the Jim Crow era —- I’m sure blacks who owned guns had as much to fear from the KKK and other white mob violence as blacks who were unarmed.

In fact, by the time one is seriously considering a heavily armed citizen vs. a mob, civilization is a distant memory. The fact that this fantasy is front and center for wingnuts is a giant tell on their views of modern US society.