A FRIEND IN NEED

By Calvin Hill

Why did no one tell him?  Why didn’t any of his “friends” tell him?  Someone should have told 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof how fortunate he was to be white in the United States, in general, and in South Carolina in particular.  Why did he not know that the rebel symbol that adorns the front plate of his automobile also flies high on an official South Carolina flagpole denoting his state’s commitment to white superiority?

Not one person bothered to tell Dylann how blessed he was to be able to walk the streets of South Carolina after being arrested for drug possession.  And according to a report by Radar Online, he also has a case pending for possession of cocaine, LSD and methamphetamine.  How could he not know that being white in South Carolina allowed him to be free to walk around, with a gun, while facing so much legal jeopardy!  The black people he accuses of “taking over the world” would not fare as well.

Dylann should have known that a black man, in South Carolina, took five bullets in the back from a law enforcement officer simply because he was afraid of the consequences of being late with his child support payments.  Dylann Roof was totally unaware that in the year of his birth, law enforcement officers rained havoc down upon black men in South Carolina when Susan Smith, a white mother, lied to police that her two white children were kidnapped by a black carjacker – or that a similar insult to black manhood occurred in the Roxbury section of Boston, Massachusetts when a white man murdered his white wife and told police that a black man shot him and killed her.  Hardly the fortunes of blacks “taking over the world.”

No one bothered to warn Roof’s black neighbors that he was spewing pro-segregationist and anti-black rhetoric, or that his rhetoric was increasingly inching toward violence.  And when his childhood friend, Joseph Meek, returned Roof’s .45 caliber handgun to the owner that Meek sensed had been racially brainwashed to the point of violent confrontation, he ignited the fuse that blew up nine innocent lives, their families, their church community, and riled the conscience of a nation.  A nation that, thankfully, is not immune to the horror of publicity seeking mass murderers.

Unfortunately, the nation’s Congress appears to have been vaccinated against feeling the pain of such horrific violence.  The US Congress can never seem to relegate reasonable and sensible avenues to secure the right of the people to keep and bear arms with the right of the people to be secure in their person in the pursuit of life and liberty.  One of Roof’s friends should have told him that the US Congress is allowing  blacks to be so marginalized at the voting booth that he need not worry about them ever “taking over.”

Clearly, America needs a better Congress.  But Dylann Roof needed better friends.

And Ain’t They American

If you Google (The black lives that don’t matter to progressives, Rich Lowry), you will encounter a disturbing May 28th opinion column that smacks of the most aggravating example of white privilege. After reading Lowry’s column, it becomes necessary to recommend he put two things at the top of his to-do list. (1) read Sojourner Truth, and (2) look in the mirror.

It has been clear for more than three decades that the weapons fomenting the shootings and killings he cites, not just in New York and Baltimore, but in black communities throughout the United States are the result of illegal interstate gun trafficking. And Lowry’s insinuation of the need for “aggressive police patrols” is patently dishonest.

Heralding Rudy Giuliani for “saving more black lives than his critics” obscures the crux of the problem. One of which is that Lowry and his conservative thinking media colleagues only mention these black deaths when those communities are outraged about unarmed blacks killed at the hands of law enforcement. Those 4 or 40 or 400 black individuals killed in Chicago or Baltimore or Brooklyn are just as American as Christopher Stevens and his fellow diplomats killed in Benghazi and the ATF agent killed as a result of Fast and Furious. If those aforementioned black lives really mattered, Congress would have, and should have, engaged hearings on the networks of illegal gun trafficking largely responsible for killing their fellow Americans.

Those black victims are no less American than the 20 children and 6 teachers murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School, yet Mr. Lowry and his conservative brethren are content to let the police violate the rights of hundreds of thousands of Americans while invoking the caveat that it is worth it if finding one gun saves one life. But how many future criminals are created by law enforcement when the policy of “reasonable suspicion” is accorded a higher constitutional standard than a legally obtained and executed warrant.

The NRA is quick to offer that background checks and other sensibly proposed gun legislation would not have prevented Sandy Hook and other such mass murders that were committed with legally obtained firearms and that government should enforce the laws already on the books. Not only is the illegality of interstate gun trafficking not being enforced, it is not even being discussed – not in the state legislatures, the US Congress or the opinion pages of American newspapers. And if the government could find their way to disarm legally armed members of the Black Panther Party over 40 years ago, they certainly have the capacity to halt the scourge of illegal interstate gun trafficking.

The manner in which Lowry and the conservative media continuously invoke the name of Al Sharpton as bystander to these American deaths is very revealing. Lost on them is that Al Sharpton promotes, on his radio program, and takes part in STOP THE VIOLENCE rallies in black communities all over the country. If black lives mattered, the media would cover those marches and rallies just like they cover the town halls and other gatherings in the aftermaths of the carnage at Sandy Hook, the University of Virginia, Columbine and the plethora of similar mass murders. Sharpton does not indulge in such ignorance as to blame Limbaugh or Lowry for not stopping those murders Yet the mainstream conservative media continue to support the false notion that Al Sharpton is tasked with ending the gang violence in black communities. These conservatives are outraged when police officers are gunned down but less so when black toddlers are killed in the crossfire of turf wars and gangland retribution. Aren’t they all equally American? And why is it Al Sharpton’s responsibility to solve the problem of illegal gun trafficking that is the cancer causing these American deaths? Why does a conservative punditry not decry, instead of promote, the insane use of resources necessary to ply hundreds of thousands of Stop & Frisks which collects a negligible amount of guns and spends millions on arrests and prosecutions for minor drug offenses? The expenditure of those enormous resources would be much better allocated, more productive and less expensive stopping the flow of illegal guns to our American communities. They are not because the Rich Lowrys categorize the victims of those guns as “nameless young black men.”

They are not nameless to those who love them or those they have victimized. One indisputable fact is that they are more than black – they are American. They are just as American as the soldiers we mourn on Memorial Day, the children shot dead in their classroom, the police officers out on patrol, the diplomats in foreign countries and a President shot to death in a Dallas motorcade. The lives and safety of these Americans deserve serious, constitutional solutions. And Mr. Lowry might have come to that realization if the word American appeared anywhere in his column.