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Persuasive Essay On Gun Control

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Gun control for who? Given the recent tragedy in Las Vegas, Nevada, where a lone gunman killed over 50 people and injured hundreds, the discussion of gun rights a dispute in the country’s storied culture wars will fail in any substantial changes to current laws. While I strongly dislike hearing of senseless deaths, especially when they seem preventable with proper legislation, however I know of gun control problematic racist past; not everything is black or white.

As Saul Cornell, a professor at Fordham University succulently explained, “Saying gun laws are always racist is just false. Saying that gun laws have never been racist is also just wrong.”

Likewise, former President of the National Rifle Association David Keene said, “You know, when you go back in our history … the initial wave of [gun-control laws] was instituted after the Civil War to deny blacks the ability to defend themselves”.

Again, gun control racist origin mars its current debate and I am fearful of laws that has historically affected African-Americans ability to defend themselves against illegal deprivation of life.

During the Reconstruction Era that followed the American Civil War numerous Southern States instituted Black Codes, which disenfranchised African-Americans and among those laws were ones that prevented African-Americans from owning guns. Effectively stripping self-defense from the Blacks gave rise to gruesome lynching’s, and both psychical and sexual violence from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, a White Supremacist organization who used terrorism to prevent African-Americans from exercising their rights.

With this is mind, it is important to appreciate courageous African-Americans civil rights activists such as Ida B. Wells, Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and who advocated for their civil rights even with their lives threatened.

Speaking of Wells she noted, “the only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.”

By the dawn of the Modern American Civil Rights Movement, gone were the egregious Black Codes and numerous African-Americans own guns to protect themselves from harm, especially in the South where the legal system failed to alleviate their plight.

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