On Sunday, comedian Michael Ian Black, who has become famous recently for his whip-smart Twitter commentary, struck gold again with a rant on gun control. This time, he called for the end of the Second Amendment and compared private gun ownership with slavery.
Here was his hot take:
First off, kudos to Black for making his argument explicit: he wants total gun confiscation. That’s what John Paul Stevens, former Supreme Court Justice, would like as well. Typically, those on the hard Left simply lie about their actual agenda, and call for “reasonable gun control legislation” without specifying exactly what that would be. Black, however, has his eyes on the prize.
But the most astonishing argument here is that private gun ownership is akin to slavery — presumably because my gun will magically kill you on its own, thus making your life subject to my whim. This is factually idiotic.
It is also ahistorical. Slaveowners loved nothing better than a disarmed slave population. In fact, keeping black Americans disarmed was one of the explicit purposes of the Dred Scott decision. And as historian David Kopel writes, Jim Crow laws attempted to keep black Americans without recourse to self-defense:
Immediately after the Civil War, Southern states enacted Black Codes, designed to keep the ex-slaves in de facto slavery and submission. Mississippi’s provision was typical: No freedman “shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition” without police permission. In areas where the Ku Klux Klan took control, “almost universally the first thing done was to disarm the negroes and leave them defenseless,” recounted the civil rights attorney Albion Tourgée, who represented Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson. The Ku Klux Klan was America’s first gun control group, as well as America’s first domestic terrorist organization.
This makes perfect sense — dictatorships often seek to disarm the most vulnerable populations first. Gun control in Nazi Germany focused largely on Jews. Non-communists were forcibly disarmed during Lenin’s rise. Civilian gun ownership is the worst enemy of government tyranny. Black should just read a book about Harriet Tubman.
But for the Left, true freedom lies in handing over your power of self-defense to an all-knowing, all-powerful state. Freedom is literally slavery, in this view. Michael Ian Black should clearly stick to comedy. But it appears he already is.