How race cases win gun rights

Clarence Page, The Detroit News

letters@detnews.com

Lobbyists for gun possession owe black Americans a historical debt of gratitude.

The Supreme Court reminds us of this debt in its recent decision to overturn Chicago's sweeping prohibition of firearm possession.

The high court decision rests on more than the Second Amendment. It also rests on the 14th Amendment, which brought equal protections under law to freed slaves after the Civil War.

How times do change. An amendment that helped blacks to protect themselves from Ku Klux Klan terrorists now is being used to help protect a black Chicago man from local gangbangers.

Como cambian los tiempos! Una enmienda que le ayudó a los afroamericanos a protegerse de terroristas del Ku Klux Klan es ahora usada para proteger a un afroamericano de Chicago de los pandilleros locales.

That was why Otis McDonald, 76, said he needed a gun to protect himself in his gang-troubled South Side neighborhood. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court agreed with his plea to overturn the city's gun ban.

In interviews, McDonald has freely acknowledged that he made a particularly attractive lead plaintiff since he is African-American, an almost invisible ethnic group in coverage of the pro-gun side. When attorneys decided to name the case "McDonald v. Chicago," McDonald told Chicago Tribune reporter Colleen Mastony earlier this year, he joked with the lawyers, "Why would you name it after me? Is it just because I'm the only black?"

No one denies that his race was a plus. Gun rights tend to be seen as a white guy's issue, since the advocates we usually see are white and male. A March poll by Pew Research Center found 64 percent of blacks thought states and localities should be able to ban handguns, compared to only 38 percent of whites. And two-thirds of white males opposed gun bans, compared to slightly less than half of white females.

The racial difference probably comes from the urbanization of most black Americans. Gun prohibitions are least popular in outer suburbs and rural areas, especially among hunters and sports shooters.

Yet armed self-defense is a long-running theme in black American history. As recently as the 1960s, for example, the Deacons for Defense and Justice were a popular and powerful self-defense group in the last days of Jim Crow segregation. But the news media paid much more attention to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his nonviolent side of the civil rights movement.

Those days came back to mind as I read Justice Clarence Thomas' separate opinion in McDonald's case. With the emotional force of a man raised in rural Georgia during the last days of legal segregation, he recounted page after page of terror spread by "militias such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, the White Brotherhood, the Pale Faces and the '76 Association" and how "the use of firearms for self-defense was often the only way black citizens could protect themselves from mob violence."

With that, he resumed an argument that Justice Antonin Scalia used two years ago in writing Heller v. Washington, D.C., which struck down a handgun ban in the nation's capital and other federal territory. Chicago's case, which also included Oak Park, answered the question of whether the 14th Amendment extended that same protection against gun bans to the states.

Thomas agreed with Otis McDonald that gun ownership was as fundamental as other rights guaranteed to black people and other Americans under the 14th Amendment, even if some criminals abuse it. Go after the offenders, they say, not the law-abiding gun owners.

Yet Thomas failed to persuade the rest of the majority to join him in his view that gun rights were fundamental enough to be almost impervious to any regulation or restrictions. Instead, the majority left enough wiggle room through due process of law for states and localities to pass some regulations and restrictions, but the details undoubtedly will have to be resolved in future court fights.

Chicago and the District of Columbia already have fought back with new laws that restrict the purchases, possession or use of guns without an outright ban. But, for the foreseeable future, this country has too long and deep of a tradition of gun ownership -- and way too many guns already in circulation -- for the tide to be easily turned by city gun ordinances, no matter how well-intentioned.

Clarence Page writes for the Chicago Tribune. His column is distributed by Tribune Media Services.

From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20100711/OPINION03/7110303/How-race-cases-win-gun-rights#ixzz0tV6La6D9