“NO GUNS FOR BLACKS”: Chicago’s gun roster riddled with racist history

Chicago (Guns Save Life) – As if the onerous fees and rigorous requirements set forth by the City of Chicago to exercise one’s civil right to own most types of firearms for personal defense aren’t enough, the Superintendent of Police has declared a long list of affordable firearms “unsafe” and prohibited them from being lawfully owned in the City of Chicago.

Today’s bans on affordable handguns have their roots in the old “Army and Navy laws” from the post-Civil War south.  These laws were first passed in the 1870s by Tennessee then other states to effectively keep the poor, recently freed slaves from firearm ownership.  The law barred the sale of handguns except the “Army and Navy” guns which were both expensive and typically already owned by white, former Confederate soldiers.

So, in addition to the mandated annual fees for registering guns, the tuition for a “firearm safety class” and all related expenses, the City then bans inexpensive, affordable guns.  Clearly, this keeps the poor, inner city black Chicagoans from their Second Amendment rights, just as poll taxes and literacy tests kept blacks from the polls before the Civil Rights Act.

Do bans on affordable guns lower the firearm homicide rates?  Not hardly.

Gun Facts reports that firearm homicide rates in Maryland rose and remained high after passage of a so-called “Saturday Night Special” ban (the term Saturday Night Special itself has a racist origin, by the way) in 1998, while the rest of the nation observed a decline in the firearm homicide rates.

Adding insult to injury, some of the firearms on the list seem to have been added for utterly arbitrary reasons.

For instance, the Walther P-22 is listed as an unsafe handgun.

There is no doubt that the folks at Walther would strongly disagree with the author of Chicago’s “Unsafe Gun” list…  which, by the way, looks a lot like New York City’s “Unsafe Gun” list.

So does she: