Race cases win gun rights for all Clarence Page July 7, 2010
Lobbyists for gun rights owe black Americans a historical debt of gratitude.
The U.S. Supreme Court reminds us of this debt in its recent decision to overturn Chicago's sweeping prohibition against handgun possession. That decision rests on more than the Second Amendment. It also rests on the 14th Amendment, which brought equal protection to freed slaves after the Civil War.
How times change. An amendment that helped blacks protect themselves from Ku Klux Klan terrorists now is being used to help protect a black Chicago man from gangbangers.
That was why Otis McDonald, 76, said he needed a gun to protect himself from criminals in his South Side neighborhood. In a 5-4 decision, the court agreed with his plea to overturn the city's handgun ban.
In interviews, McDonald freely acknowledged that he made a particularly attractive lead plaintiff since he is African-American, an almost invisible ethnic group on the pro-gun side. When attorneys decided to name the case "McDonald vs. Chicago," McDonald told Chicago Tribune reporter Colleen Mastony, he jokingly told them, "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 gun 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 with 38 percent of whites. And two-thirds of white males opposed gun bans, compared with 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 sport shooters.
Yet, armed self-defense is a long-running theme in African-American history. As recently as the 1960s, for example, the Deacons for Defense and Justice was a popular and powerful self-defense group in the last days of Jim Crow. Yet, news media paid much more attention to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his non-violent side of the civil rights movement.
Those days came 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 "firearms for self-defense was often the only way black citizens could protect themselves from mob violence."
With that, Thomas picked up on an argument 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 territories. 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 under the 14th Amendment, even if some criminals abuse it. Go after the offenders, they say, not 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 for states and localities to pass some regulations and restrictions. The details undoubtedly will be resolved in future court fights.
Chicago and the District of Columbia already have fought back with new laws that restrict the purchase, possession or use of guns without an outright ban.
But this country has too long and too deep of a tradition of gun ownership — and way too many guns already in circulation — for the tide to be turned in the foreseeable future by city gun ordinances, no matter how well-intentioned.
Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune's editorial board and blogs at http://chicagotribune.com/pagespage
