Captain America Checks In Again!

Cross-posting Captain America's excellent piece on the NRA:

RACISM FUELS PA'S. LIBERAL ANTI GUN AGENDA

Gun cultures clash, & 'Pa. lost'
John Baer
Philadelphia Daily News

PENNSYLVANIA'S diversity showed itself again yesterday in votes against gun-control bills in a state of hunters, sportsmen and the National Rifle Association.

Despite a reasoned, impassioned, at times accusatory 40-minute appeal by Gov. Rendell in a rare appearance before a legislative committee, efforts to limit handgun sales, to give Philly its own gun laws and to require owners to report lost or stolen handguns all failed.

The third measure was withdrawn after the first two were voted down.

Its chief sponsor, Rep. Jewell Williams, D-Philly, tells me, "The yahoos win again."

The yahoos, I ask?

"Yeah," he says, "the old boys with the boots and the guns."

Some "yahoos" say that Rendell's grandstanding for the old hometown.

And so it goes. The great divide, the state's cultural clash between its vast rural populace and urban areas, continues.

LINK

I came across this gem while looking for another story. Apparently if you are a supporter of Second Amendment rights in Pennsylvania, you are a "Yahoo" "An old boy with boots and guns" according to Rep. Jewell Williams. I'm actually quite stunned. I'm not stupid, I know what Rep. Williams is saying, what his between the lines meaning is. "Old Boy" is code for "White Male". Yahoo is derisive. So this lawmaker is expressing contempt for people like me, based on our political belief and the color of our skin. Plain and simple. He should immediately disavow these comments and apologize. Ordinarily using language like this in modern day America is enough to get you fired and sued. Except one thing: Jewell Williams is black and therefore he gets a free pass from the reporter who interviewed him.

It doesn't help that John Baer's whole reason for writing this piece was to decry the legislatures decision NOT to consider worthless, possibly unconstitutional gun laws. As a liberal reporter when this lawmaker made veiled, racially derogatory remarks, he didn't call him on it. He just repeated the term. He didn't ask him who he was referring to and what he meant by those words. But those of us who were targeted don't need him to ask. We know racism when we hear it.

It's especially disgraceful for the media to engage in this sort of irresponsible journalism. There is a strong racial component to the gun control argument as in every other issue in America today. Firearm violence, especially handgun violence is at epidemic proportions in the urban black communities. That is an indisputable fact. Most of the murder and mayhem is drug related, but much of it is just a byproduct of a broken culture that glorifies crime and violence. A relatively small cadre of repeat offenders are responsible for an astonishing amount of crime and the judicial system is either unable or incapable of coping.

These facts are not lost on our State Lawmakers. Many of their districts are rural where there are plenty of firearms, but the culture is vastly different, both socially and racially. It's a plain fact that suburban and urban whites just don't blow each other away four or five times a day despite being well armed. They are fanatically defensive of their rights when it comes to gun ownership. Their belief is that criminals don't obey the laws we have now and they won't in the future. Disarming suburban whites will have no effect on urban black homicides because suburban whites aren't doing the killing. So there I said it. The question is why didn't John Baer say it?