I’ve had this in my tabs for a while now, meaning to get around to highlighting some of the article int his issue. Unfortunately, I’ve been a bit too busy to get around to it, but there is some excellent stuff in here. I’ve read drafts of Nick Johnson’s “Firearms Policy and the Black Community: An Assessment of the Modern Orthodoxy,” and would highly recommend it. I plan to get around to highlighting these articles eventually, but I wanted to offer an opportunity to anyone who might want to get a head start on me. I probably won’t have a whole lot of time until the holidays.
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That’s some heavy reading, I can see why it’s been in your tabs for a while. At about page 30 of Mr. Johnson’s article, and it’s very interesting. I was vaguely aware of some of the events he references, but not so many and not in such detail. 46 killed!?! Today it’s hard to imagine that kind of focused mob violence happening in America and it not being a national emergency. Back then, achieving public awareness and making such issues a political priority would have been horribly difficult. These are obvious conclusions, but it’s amazing to contemplate what living in that world must have been like. Justifiably would have started a culture of self-defense and self-armament. Looking forward to his exploration of how that changed. The metamorphosis from being a critic of the state, to co-opting the state, to becoming an agent of the state is as old as time, both at a macro and a micro level. We so often think of the state as being a different entity particular to its own time, circumstance and the personalities or intents involved. I think the better perspective across history is that ‘The State’ whether by phenomenon, syndrome, or general human involvement should be regarded as a consistent immutable entity, constrained or manipulated according to circumstance but always having the same oppressive tendencies. As Nietzsche warned, and maybe the Lord of the Rings illustrates, you don’t change the State and use it for your purposes, the State changes you and uses you for its purposes. It’s anthropomorphism, but useful for our understanding though.