GUN ADVOCATE CHAD GLOVER ON WHY GUN CONTROL COULD LEAVE AFRICAN-AMERICANS DEFENSELESS (MF GALAXY 163) – 2018 April 02

MF GALAXY

Whether you hear this podcast the day it went live—April 30, 2018—or any other day, you’ll have some mass-shooting in the United States that makes this discussion timely. According to AOL.com, in 2017 the United States endured 345 mass shootings. The Atlantic reported in 2016 that the US, with less than five percent of the world’s population, holds 35 – 40 percent of the world’s guns. The Gun Violence Archive reports that in 2017, Americans used guns to kill 15,000 Americans; more than 3000 of them were teens; police shot or killed more than 2000; and more than 2000 shootings were unintentional.

According to stereotypes, US Republicans love guns and US Democrats hate them, and since African-Americans are overwhelmingly Democrats, according to the transitive principle, most African-Americans must hate guns, too, right? After all, a lethal triad of street criminals, police criminals, and Whitesupremacist criminals use guns to terrorise African-Americans.

But it’s not that simple, as history demonstrates, and as my guest today will show.

Chad Glover is a writer and software developer from Philadelphia. According to his bio, he “grew up in a household where guns were commonplace,” but he “didn’t explore firearms as a skill and legacy until he moved to Stone Mountain Georgia,” which he calls “the spiritual home of the KKK.” That led him to write “about the forgotten ways that firearm ownership shaped the struggle for African liberation,” a tradition that includes the Deacons for Defense and the Black Panther Party. He describes himself as “a liberal gun owner,” and an active part of a continually-growing African-American gun community. You can find his essays on his African gun ownership at his blog, Daddys-gun.com.

Chad Glover spoke with me by digital video on March 23, 2018, from his home in Atlanta. We discussed:

• The understandable motivations for gun control advocacy, but what those motives ignore
• How Euro-American massacres against African-American communities demonstrate the importance of African gun ownership
• The effective response to racist so-called open-carry marchers
• Why the Trojan Horse gun control strategy of getting African- and Muslim-Americans to join NRA will not work, and
• What the discussion of gun control would need to include for him to take the movement seriously