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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (512001)	9/10/2009 12:45:45 PM
From: d[-_-]b	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577252

How about that he claimed the NRA was founded by the KKK instead of Union Army officers that were suppressing the Klan. The forgotten truth about the relationship between blacks, the NRA and the KKK: en.wikipedia.org Robert Franklin Williams (February 26, 1925 – October 15, 1996) was a civil rights leader, author, and the president of the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP chapter in the 1950s and early 1960s. At a time when racial tension was high and official abuses were rampant, Williams was a key figure in promoting both integration and armed Black self-defense in the United States. Williams' 1962 book, Negroes with Guns, details Williams experience with violent racism and the pacifist Civil Rights Movement philosophies he disagreed with. Williams had already started the Black Armed Guard with the National Rifle Association's blessings, to defend the local black community from Ku Klux Klan activity. KKK membership numbered some 15,000 locally at a time when gun ownership was fairly common in the South. Black residents fortified their homes with sandbags and resorted to being trained with rifles on hand in the event of night raids by the Klan. Followers attested to Williams' advocacy of the use of advanced powerful weaponry instead of more traditional firearms. Williams insisted his position was defensive in the face of provocation as opposed to a declaration of war: "armed self-reliance" in the face of white terrorism. Threats against Williams' life and on his family would become more frequent.

To: Brumar89 who wrote (512001)	9/10/2009 7:08:23 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1577252

So many lies to choose from. How about that he claimed the NRA was founded by the KKK instead of Union Army officers that were suppressing the Klan. Bowling for Michael Moore By Jim Dallas I finally got around to seeing Michael Moore's Academy-award-winning documentary Bowling for Columbine. Even conservative critics acknowledged that the film is hilarious; but the NRA wasn't happy. They complained that use of video shot at a NRA convention in North Carolina was inappropriately presented as footage at the NRA meeting in Denver held shortly after the Columbine tragedy. This is (technically) a legitimate gripe, although it's not particularly uncommon for television news broadcasters to use stock footage and I don't think it seriously undermines Moore's point. But most of the NRA's fire is reserved for a segment which ties the explosion of gun ownership in the 19th century to racism: Another outrageous sequence in Moore`s supposedly "non-fiction motion picture," tries to associate NRA with the Ku Klux Klan and depicts an NRA member assisting in a Klan cross burning. The rationale? NRA was founded in 1871—the year the KKK was declared an illegal organization. The absurd connection is intentional. It`s Michael Moore`s idea of humor. An honest documentary would record that NRA was founded by former Union Army officers who fought a war to bring an end to slavery. It would record that Civil War veteran Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside was the Association`s first president. It would record that the man who signed the act making the Klan an illegal organization later became NRA`s eighth president—Ulysses S. Grant. A true documentary would note that NRA`s early history was written by figures who had not only fought to end slavery, but who would later oppose the persecution of freedmen. Such a man would assume command of the Fifth Military District, and he would then remove governors in Texas and Louisiana for failing to oppose the KKK. That man later became NRA`s ninth president—Gen. Philip H. Sheridan. To be clear, the line connecting the NRA to the Ku Klux Klan might be gratuitous. But it probably isn't as far from the truth as the NRA wants to admit; lots of Union soldiers were racists (and let us not forget that the Klan was not just anti-black but more broadly neo-Confederate; one could be a racist but against the Klan simply by virtue of being a Damnyankee or "scalawag"). And just because the organization had presidents like Burnside, Sheridan, and Grant doesn't exactly prove that its members were squeaky-clean. But in any case, the fact that the NRA seizes upon one flippant joke in one of the film's lighter scenes shows, I think, just how desperate they are. The larger point made by the "Brief History of the United States" cartoon is that white culture in the United States has been incredibly paranoid and fearful. And in general, this is spot on. (One might also suppose that the NRA - of which Michael Moore is a lifetime member - might be grateful that the film explicitly points out that some of the first gun control laws were racist attempts to disarm the black community.) It's also downright silly to deny that white racism is partly to blame for America's fascination with guns. Many gunowners (and particularly the worst ones, in my experience) are ones who think that owning a gun will protect them from the "criminal element" (Warning! Racially Loaded Term!) of society. In order to check this idea, I did some back-of-the-envelope data analysis using GSSDirs, an incomparable research tool which allows University Web users to analyze data from NORC's General Social Survey. True to my expectations: Gun- owners are more likely to support racial segregation than non-owners. White gun-owners are considerably less likely to say that they are "close" to blacks. Indeed, according to my analysis, white gun owners are equally likely to espouse racist (49.5%) and non-racist (50.5%) attitudes toward blacks; only a third of non-gun owners admit to not liking black people. Gun owners (and especially white gun owners) tend to say they feel safer in their community than non-gun owners (despite clear evidence that guns provide a false sense of security). I don't mean, of course, to cast any aspersions on the majority of gun owners, who, I think we can be sure, are not closet racists. Indeed, most gunowners and many NRA members are genuine sportsmen. Overall, I think, Bowling is a fair treatment of the issue which plays to neither gun-rughts or gun-control ideologues. I think it is one of the best pieces in recent years to show just how foolish the gun-control ninnies are - after all, Canada has lots of guns but very few murders. The problem is clearly cultural - but not the kind of "pop culture" red herrings conservatives and Joe Lieberman whine about. It calls the NRA and Charlton Heston for their clear insensitivity towards gun victims. Incidentally, the NRA thinks that Bowling is "un-American" because, in short, it dares to argue that the reason everyday Americans keep killing each other with guns is... because there's something wrong with the way everyday Americans think and act. So much for "Guns don't kill people, People kill People!" Again - I happen to believe that the right to own a firearm is an important Constitutional right and that further gun control legislation is wrong. But, I also happen to think that private groups like the NRA (and more importantly, the government) are not doing enough to push gun safety, individual responsibility, and a strong community ethic. burntorangereport.com