Here's an article from GOA. I don't have the name of the author, but it's a good read. Civilian disarmament has always been a way to supress the public. It certainly was popular back when the KuKluxKlan was in action. The police (often Klansmen themselves) simply disarmed the blacks and then threw on their robes and got on their horses at night to beat/murder/rape/pillage/etc the blacks. It took armed response and the willingness to DEFEND with threat of force to stop the crimes. Imagine that, civilian disarmament only encouraging predators, while armed defense STOPS them cold.
Read Article HEREA little known bit of American history has been snatched from oblivion by Tulane University Professor Lance Hill. He has documented the pivotal events in the civil rights movement in his book Deacons of Defense :Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement.
Hill makes it clear that the civil rights movement in the south would have been wiped out by the KuKluxKlan if it had not been for the Deacons. Before the rise of the Deacons for Defense and Justice (their full name), the prevailing idealogy was the product of white liberals from the north who had no concept of the terrorism the Klan could unleash.
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and The Southern Christian Leadership Campaign (Martin Luther King's organization) were all proponents of meeting voilence with pasifism. Jesse Jackson, then an aid to King, drank so deeply of this pasifictic well that he is still (along with most of the black leadership in the US) anti-self defense and a supporter of gun control.
The deacons first emerged as a visible defense force in Jonesboro, La. From the very begining the Deacons represented a new force in the civil rights movement-- leadership had passed from the northern white liberals (and blacks who bought into that liberalism) to southern working class blacks who lived in the very communities where the Deacons were active.
The spring and summer of 1964 were a time of growing anti-segregation demonstrations in Jonesboro. The Klan responded at one point with a menacing parade through the black section of town - lead by the chief of police. The deacons informed the chief that if it happened again, "there would be some killing going on. The Klan never did that again.
Cross burning ended suddenly the night that a cross was set on fire in front of a clergyman's house. Shots rang out aimed at the Klan as the torch touched the cross. They never repeated that trick.
During a desegregation effort at Jonesboro High School, the authorities brought up fire trucks and attempted to hose the black students attempting to enter the school. The Deacons pulled up and publicly loaded shotguns and then made it plain that the lead was for the firemen if they turned the hoses on. The firemen wisely beat a retreat.
This was a very significant event. This was a self-defense effort in the spirit of the American War for Independence. The government was attempting to enforce illegitimate power (enforcing an unbiblical law which by this time also violated federal law) and it was repulsed by the use of community force -- a miitia, if you will.
The Deacons were in the great tradition of American freedom -- liberty is not given by tyrants and thugs it is wrestled from their hands by force.
Jonesboro saw one more excercise of defensive force before the Klan was finally convinced that they could not intimidate the black community. When Deacon Elmo Jacobs was driving a carload of white civil rights workers they were fired upon and took a load of buckshot in the door of Jacobs car. Jacobs returned fire and the Klan attack ended immediately-- and for good.
In Bogalusa, La, Hill found that the police made no efforts to stop the attacks and in fact took pains to arrest blacks who had armed themselves in self defense. In other words, gun control was simply a tool of people control and had nothing to do with fighting crime. Had crime control been the concern, plenty of opportunities had come and gone to arrest the Klan.
FBI agent Frank Hicks warned Bogalusa blacks that any shooting by a black -- of a white--would result in an arrest for murder. He did not explain how the FBI had any legal or constitutional authority for such a move, but the Deacons were not interested in a scholarly debate. They simply told Hicks that self defense is a constitutional right. Hicks got the message.
A lethal moment in Bogalusa shocked the Klan with the realizaion the blacks were no longer chattel punching bags. During a 1965 summer desegregation demonstration, white hecklers turned violent and threw a brick which struck Hattie Mae Hill. The white mob surrounded the car the Deacons were using to attempt an evacuation of the terrified girl.
As the mob threatened to break into the car deacon Henry Austin shouted that he had a gun. The he fired a warning shot from his .38 into the air. The mob kept closing in. Austin then fired almost point blank into the chest of Alton Crowe who was in the front of the mob. While Crowe survived, the fun of beating up blacks ended that day in Bogalusa.
All the white liberals in the north and all their black allies, with all their clucking that defensive violence would only provoke more violence, had failed to get the feds to enforce their civil rights laws. Henry Austin and the Deacons had succeeded. After all if the police and National Guard had not been mobilized, there might have been harm to Klansmen.
The battle raged for another year or so, but Bogalusa and Jonesboro resistence efforts proved to be the turning point. Klan meetings became more likely to involve admiration of a colleague's tooth than to plan a terrorist act that might get Klansmen killed.
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