“The black men in the community wouldn’t stand for it. You shoot at us, we shoot back at you. I’m convinced that without our guns, my family and many other black people would not be alive today.” – Charles Hicks in On MLK holiday, walking for civil rights and the Second Amendment [via washingtonpost.com]

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39 COMMENTS

  1. As to what they “wouldn’t stand for…”

    “The Klan would drive through our neighborhood shooting at us, shooting into our homes”

    I had to click through to find out. Out of context quote is difficult to parse.

    • I can’t think of a better success story for armed defense, or a better group of people to shoot back at.

    • I think removeing the intro (The black men in the community wouldn’t stand for it…) would leave you with all the context you need instead of guessing what “it” is. Focusing too hard on the KKK lets today’s pregressives think tyranny was an isolated problem in the past, despite the article’s examples of recent needs for self defense.

  2. The author, an African American himself, asks some tough questions. Not Hicks’ quote but still important: “So, on one side of the gun issue, we have a call for fewer guns; on the other, a call for more fathers. Which would be easier to achieve?”

    • Do you give a man a fish and hope he can sustain himself forever or do you teach a man to fish and give him a skill that can feed him his whole life?

      It is not a question of easier, better fathers, more fathers are required to break the cycle. The issue is about breaking the cycle and making opportunity. It is about teaching responsibility and instilling the ideal of achievement and purpose in life.

      Begin with some the leaders that are elected. What have they really done for the black community? We have public transportation that traps the black community to only as far as the bus line can go. There are few work programs and summer programs to keep kids involved versus getting involved with gangs. Often a crappy job is done to police the community. When some cities and some communities see an improvement it is when there is a deep community involvement with everyone getting involved.

      Sure, it is easy to ban guns, but you take away a right from everyone while zero is done to fix the problems of poverty, poor education, drugs and crime. Are all these things hard? Yes, will they take time and money and perhaps a generation to break the cycle? Yes — but I have yet seen a sustained effort to make changes.

      Knock down the blighted buildings and teach inner city men how use a hammer to build something for themselves. Would they then destroy the things that they themselves sweat to build and can then live in?

      Knock down the blighted buildings and create gardens where people can grow things — again — create jobs in growing and selling what they grow to the community.

      Create jobs in poor communities — green jobs and green technologies are probably not money makers but they can provide cheap utilities to poor communities.

      After pre-school and after school programs and make parent personally responsible — and the parents cannot read, then teach them to read too.

      My taxes get pissed away and govt bullshit all the time, I would happily pay and know that may taxes would go to fix a community. How many millions have been spent to determine if cows farting produce green house gasses?

      The issue is the black community and the leader that they elect often times do things such there is always a need so that you are required to come back to them. Nothing is done to break the dependence nor are the proper things done to remove the dependence. It must begin one community at a time, starting with a smaller one, creating great success and then moving on to the next one.

      IMHO, neither liberals nor democrates nor Republicans do enough to bring people up to remove dependence — they simple give things away and thus poverty remains. I will extend this to ALL government or psuedo-government bodies because the U.N. has a $5.7B program to end poverty and through their own admission and study have said that it “has done nothing to imptove conditions of poverty around the world”

      So, all the gun control will not stop the killing in Chicago or Stockton or anyplace else but gun control simply takes away the rights of other to make believe we are solving a problem.

      What needs to change is how we think about problems. While I am sure as a people we can do anything, WE CANNOT do everything so we must choose wisely and gun control does nothing but make criminals of law abiding citizens.

      • Well stated and I fully agree that I wouldn’t mind paying my taxes one bit if I knew it was being used wisely to actually fix a crime and poverty striken community. It would also be nice if our government would take a break from spending billions on helping foriegn countries and concentrate our efforts on our own for a while.

        • Paying your taxes would be fine – if those taxes were actually used to PAY for anything. THEY ARE NOT. They’re barely used to pay down the debt. They’re thrown into the bottomless pit of foreign aggression to further enrich already filthy-rich BANKSTERS.

          They don’t NEED your taxes. They print money from NADA. What they do is WANT your taxes. And GET them.

          This serpent desperately needs its head lopped off.

        • If you’re going to quote it, quote the whole thing. Because it’s soul-stirringly awesome.

          I do not aim with my hand;
          he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
          I aim with my eye.

          I do not shoot with my hand;
          he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.
          I shoot with my mind.

          I do not kill with my gun;
          he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.
          I kill with my heart.

          For a liberal writer from the Northeast, that Stephen King knows some shit, eh?

      • Look what happens to successful, positive black men and women. Condi Rice, Herman Cain, Mia Love, on and on. Instead of serving as national role models, these brilliant scholars, businessmen, and leaders are demonized for daring to believe in the American dream and traditional American values.

        And I agree, in addition to national role models, we have to get back to the example of a father that simply does what was taken for granted not long ago in our culture: Teaches his kids personal responsibility through the example of helping to raise his kids and balance his damn check book. This problem isn’t unique to the African American community. The Progressives have been doing everything they can to undermine the family for generations.

  3. Thank you, Mr. Hicks. You and your brothers in the Deacons for Defense and Justice are American heros like the Minutemen. You personify God’s admonitions in I Tim.5:8 and Rom. 15:1-3.

  4. The racial gun laws passed in the south years ago give the best example of how it’s never about gun safety, it’s about controlling people.

    • There is also a correlation between democrats and the KKK…

      Primarily to keep firearms out of the hands of blacks!

        • Dude, the correlation is simple: The Democrats WERE the KKK (or at least, the KKK was a sub-set of democrats). The Dems were started as the party of the white man in the South. Even in more recent history, the Republicans shoved the Equal Rights Amendment down the Democrats’ collective throats. It’s only recently that the Dems have shifted strategy from trying to dominate African Americans through racist laws to trying to keep them pacified and subservient through the welfare state.

          “I’ll have those n*****s voting Democratic for the next 200 years.” Lyndon Baines Johnson about the Great Society plan. It’s on tape in his own voice in his Presidential library.

          What? That doesn’t square with what you learned in school? Look it all up for yourself. It’s all there in the historical record.

          OK, this is off topic, but the more times the suppressed true story peaks through the cracks, the better.

        • Jesus, how come that Americans don’t even know their own history?

          Yes, Dems were the pro-slavery party, and later pro-segregation, and Reps were the other side. And yes, this was still true during Civil Rights era. But immediately afterwards, the parties have effectively switched sides, and most of the racist guys ended up on the R side of the fence (see also: Dixiecrats etc).

      • That was an “every party” thing.

        Do remember what that one ex-actor did as governor of Cal back in the day. I think his name was Ronnie…

  5. Impossible, all gun owners are racists, KKK Grand Wizard bigots. Or so Huffpo and Raw Story would have you believe. Strange as my heritage is Jewish and Catholic…hmm but I guess the gun grabbers know me better than I know myself.

  6. I am a middle aged Black man. Born in the inner city of Brooklyn. Gun control has hurt us for centuries. It is time to turn the tide and stop the real madness which allows the criminals to be armed and the innocent to be defenseless.

  8. Was it not one of the original purposes of the NRA to provide weapons and training to freed black slaves so that they could defend themselves from racist aggeession?

    • It was. I attempted to post something similar in the comments section of the WaPo story in question in reply to a post made my “PrepperDr” complaigning about rascist NRA members. It would not load however:

      “It is true. Some NRA members in supporting their favorite cause also go along with the other planks in the Republican Party platform which champion conservative stances on social issues. They are no more or less misled than the supporters of the Democratic Party platform who also blindly champion liberal positions that are at odds with their best interests long term.

      Most people are unaware the NRA was founded in 1871 by Union Army veterans of the Civil War with the express purpose of training recently freed slaves in safe gun handling and marksmanship so they could properly exercise ALL their civil rights which is the DUTY of EVERY American Citizen.

      All gun control laws in this country have their roots in Jim Crow. The modern version, The Gun Control Act of 1968, was a direct reaction to the Black Power movement. All gun control laws are racist. NRA members recognize this, why don’t you?”

      No Justice, No Peace. -Goldi

  9. To a control freak, people are allowed to be free, but only carefully supervised and approved ways. Charles Hicks here is expressing a fundamentally human idea–not a black or white idea, not an idea tied to one group only–the idea that we all should be free to live our lives as we see fit.

    • Yep, and the left simply can’t abide that. They, more than any other group I have known, love making rules by which they expect their neighbors to live.

  10. “Growing up, we had a lot of admiration for the Deacons,” Hicks said. “Their philosophy was, ‘It’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees.’ ”

    With guns in hand, they didn’t have to do either.”

    Got that right.

  11. “So, on one side of the gun issue, we have a call for fewer guns; on the other, a call for more fathers. Which would be easier to achieve?”

    Who cares which is easier? Which of them actually solves a problem, instead of treats a symptom?

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