I want to take a moment to show how far America has come since the darkest days of gun control. I’m speaking here of the post-Civil War period, when Southern states enacted gun control laws to disarm African-Americans. Laws that embodied and emboldened the Ku Klux Klan’s “disarmament program;” an effort accompanied by the rape, torture, murder and intimidation of thousands of defenseless citizens. A state of affairs acknowledged and condemned by the United States Supreme Court in the McDonald decision. Today, the FBI reports that police apprehended 4873 hate crime offenders in 2010. Of those, .03 percent murdered or raped their victims. That’s 14.6 bad guys. Unstated: the split between murder and rape and the murder weapon used (if any). But still, we’ve come a long way as a nation. Despite gun control, not because of it.
