Hey, you can't argue with the techniques of professional journalism.
Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
Posted on 01/17/2011 1:22:10 PM PST by presidio9
As the country marks the 25th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Day Holiday, it remains shaken by the unspeakable horror of the wounded and dead in Tucson. The madness and carnage of the rampage stand in sharp contrast to the celebration of the birthday of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who changed American history through nonviolent protest. While King, who would now have been 82, lived in a time far removed from the world of the Tea Party, red and blue states or, for that matter, the very idea of a President Obama, the events of last weekend in Arizona would surely have produced a strong reaction from the civil rights leader.
His pronouncements, particularly in the later years of his life, offer clues to what the slain preacher from Atlanta might have concluded.
For one thing, as some politicians sprint in retreat from language and symbols of insensitivity, King would almost certainly point out that it is as impossible to erase the image of cross hairs positioned over districts as it is to unring a bell. And in a political atmosphere where such terms as "blood libel" and calls to "reload" are tossed about without a thought of their potentially incendiary consequences, King would likely call for his country to engage in a more civil discussion of their differences - and, more pointedly, for policies that would better protect his countrymen.
After all, King was the man who, in 1967 said, "The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence, you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: Only love can do that."
It's not difficult to make the leap that the man who spoke those words, who would go on to oppose his government's involvement in the Vietnam War, who would go from traveling with armed body guards in the 1950s to walking without them even as he rightly feared his own assassination - that this man would speak forcefully about the imperative of controlling guns in the United States.
Hasan Kwame Jeffries, an associate professor of history at Ohio State University and an expert on the civil rights movement, makes the case. "It's certainly a probability that, if he were alive today, he would look at gun control as something that needed to be addressed," Jeffries told me. "He had already identified urban gang violence as an issue, particularly the use of guns by African-Americans again east other. And King's genius was not just to look at the specific problem in a community - but to identify the larger causes of the problem, and to remedy them."
By the time King took his movement north, he would spend hours with black gang members, preaching about the evils of gun violence. One might imagine his reaction to some of the disturbing facts in a recent report from the Children's Defense Fund. According to that report, between 1979 and 2007, the number of firearm deaths of black children and teens would increase each year by an average of 61%. In the same period, the annual number of firearm deaths of white children would decline by 54%.
King might well have considered the control of access to guns a civil rights issue.
A man who led a nonviolent civil rights movement in which many of its supporters were the victims of violence, including gun violence, would likely support reforms of gun laws. That would probably include measures that would make it as difficult as possible for a madman in Arizona to purchase and carry a concealed weapon with no special permit - as well as for initiatives that would address the epidemic of urban school violence that accounted for the shooting of 258 public school students in 2009 in Chicago alone.
At the very least, King would call for an intense national period of self-examination on the impact of political vitriol and for an examination of a culture that has caused Arizonans to react to the bloodshed in Tucson, according to FBI statistics, by scrambling to buy even more guns.
One can easily hear Dr. King's 1967 words about Vietnam being applied to the current gun culture in America: "Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now."
Hicks, a senior fellow at the DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy, was a political reporter for The New York Times.
I got out my Ouija board and I’m positive after consulting it that King believed in Aliens.
Former New Yawk Slimes “poltical reporter”, little Jonny Hicks isn’t about to let the murder of 6 Americans by a looney, liberal pothead go to waste. Exploit! Exploit! Exploit!
I wonder how effective Dr King would have been against
a certain dictator in Germany in the 1933-45 time period...?
What is never stated when lauding the likes of King or Gandhi is that non violence works only in civil democracies.
Dr Kings followers would have been terminated prejuidiciously in double quick time had they been in a dictatorship.
Either this went up a whole lot more than I thought, or the idiotic author cannot write a clear sentence.
I bet he would have also favored the repeal of the 1st amendment, something the NY Daily News should be very thoughtful about.
I believe that if King had lived, he would now be a ballerina.
King was a communist. So assuming he would be against the 2nd Amendment is a no-brainer.
LOL!
And Gandhi deplored that the Indian people had been disarmed. Non-violence was his only recourse.
These Progressive-Liberals are absolutely brilliant!
Not only do they read minds, figure things out like a computer, have intelligence that surpasses the cattle in the electorate, but they can channel with great men of the past!
How brilliant, absolutely brilliant!!!
/s/
IMHO
Memo to Daily News: The US will repeal the second amendment right before they repeal the 14th amendment which will happen the day after I am elected Pope.
This is just using MLK as a mind-controlled zombie. Sick.
Wow.
Writing actual articles based on nothing but suppositions.
Gotta love the gatekeeper media, they are so fair and balanced and like to make things up. (like be fair and balanced and mentally stable)
If King were alive today, he’d be scratching at the top of his coffin...
I don’t believe this.
Hey, you can't argue with the techniques of professional journalism.
Ralph Bunche wrote for a Marxist review from 1936 - 1940 WEB DuBois was a committed Marxist
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