Gun nuts have gotten a rap for being racist, and it’s not a rap I’d entirely dispute. There’s definitely a fair amount of bigotry on display at gun shows. Though, I’d argue, no more than in the population at large — it’s just that most of the folks who attend gun shows lack much interest in trying to veil their bigotry in euphemism.

That said, what about anti-gun nuts? Reason I bring the question up is that this blurb from the Violence Policy Center in a study entitled “Black Homicide Victimization in the United States” has been making the rounds:

Blacks in the United States are disproportionately affected by homicide. For the year 2007, blacks represented 13 percent of the nation’s population, yet accounted for 49 percent of all homicide victims.

As noted at the beginning of this study, the devastation homicide inflicts on black teens and adults is a national crisis, yet it is all too often ignored outside of affected communities.

For blacks, like all victims of homicide, guns — usually handguns — are far and away the number one murder tool. Successful efforts to reduce America’s black homicide toll must put a focus on reducing access to firearms.

Now, my interest in firearms is fairly simple. Every human has a right to self defense. Every state on the planet claims — or would like to claim — a monopoly on violence, but every person on the planet has the right to defend themselves against violence. That includes Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement defending themselves against American violence, just as much as it includes Zapatistas defending themselves against Mexican violence, just as much as it includes individual citizens defending themselves or their loved ones against criminal violence.

I don’t think that’s a radical proposition. And given the endless propensity for violence on display in the human race, I don’t find it unreasonable for one to have the means and ability to defend themselves and their loved ones on hand. Not everybody knows somebody who has been murdered, but everybody knows somebody who has been raped. And almost everybody knows somebody who has been brutalized because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or because they looked or acted differently from their attackers. Or because they got in the middle of a situation they shouldn’t have. Or just because their attacker was bigger and stronger than them, or thought they had the right to be brutal because they were given some kind of state sanction.

To put it another way, I don’t personally know anybody whose house has burned down, but I make sure the smoke detectors work, that I have a fire extinguisher handy in the kitchen, and that my upstairs bedroom has a fire ladder. By the same token, I know a couple of people who’ve been murdered, and more than I can count who’ve been raped and/or beaten into a pulp for no good reason whatsoever. So I keep the means to defend myself and my loved ones around. That doesn’t like rocket science to me.

Which brings me back to my question. How the hell is it not racist to “put a focus on reducing access to firearms” by blacks? To remove, in other words, the only means of self defense against an entire segment of the population based solely on race? Especially one that is, as the study says, disproportionately affected by violence.

Here’s an answer, in the form of a video produced by Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, an organization that I probably have lots and lots of philosophical differences with, but also one very large commonality.

Part one:

Part two:

Update: Edited for clarity. Will probably be edited again for the same. Sorry, haste, waste, all that.