Which brings me to the Right-To-Carry issue. Missouri is unfortunately one of the five remaining states which absolutely prohibit honest adults from carrying a concealed firearm for protection. There is no permit available here under any circumstances. The legislature passed Right-To-Carry last month, but it is not yet law, and there is fear that our Governor may veto the measure, although I believe there are enough votes for a veto override. (7/3/03 update: Gov. Holden just vetoed RTC in a big ceremony this afternoon in St. Louis County. 9/11/03 Update: The Missouri House and Senate just overrode Governor Holden's veto of RTC. Missourians just got some of their rights back, after 129 years.) I wrote an article for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on this issue, but they want you to pay $2.95 to read it online. I'll put my article up on my site when I get the text loaded.
When discussing this matter, people inevitably bring up Missouri’s 1999 ballot referendum on Right-To-Carry, which was narrowly defeated (with a dismal 30% voter turnout, I might add.) The fact is that the measure passed in almost every county in the state. The defeat came from the fact that two very large urban precincts in St. Louis and Kansas City were over 90% opposed. At the time, I thought this was vote fraud (and to be honest, I still think that was a factor). Ninety percent? You can’t get ninety percent agreement on anything.
A black businessman (who was one of the handful of St. Louis city residents who voted for the referendum) and I were discussing the recent passage of RTC. I brought up the referendum results, and said I could not understand why blacks had been so uniformly against the measure. The proposal was a "shall issue" one, where if you satisfied the requirements (training, fingerprints, no criminal record, no mental illness, etc.) you couldn’t be denied the permit just because the sheriff didn’t like the idea of people besides the police having guns. The businessman stared at me.
"I thought you were good at math," he said. I allowed as to how I felt that I was. "Then you must never have taken Statistics and Probability." I told him I had done this also, and that it had been one of the most rewarding math classes I had ever taken (and incidentally was taught by Amherst’s professor Denton, who is black.) "Then you must be cowed enough by political correctness to never think of applying statistics and probability to anything involving race." Finally I admitted that this last accusation might be true.
"Then I am going to ask you two true-or-false questions. One: Do blacks in the city of St. Louis have large extended families?" I answered in the affirmative. "Two: Is it true that in St. Louis, over 40% of the black males between the ages of 17 and 25 have criminal records?" I told him that was also true, unfortunately.
"So here is the important question: What are the chances of a black person of voting age in St. Louis having at least one relative with a criminal record? Assume we define ‘relative’ broadly, to include the young men who father the children of our female relatives, whether married to them or not." He sat there waiting for my answer.
"Are we talking fathers, stepfathers, uncles, brothers, stepbrothers, male cousins, sons, stepsons, nephews, mothers’ boyfriends, aunts' boyfriends, sisters’ boyfriends, daughters’ boyfriends, stepdaughters’ boyfriends, female cousins’ boyfriends, nieces’ boyfriends, as well as anyone actually married to a female relative?" I asked. He nodded. "Then I’d say there's nearly 100% probability that at least one relative would have a criminal record." He smiled at me like a teacher who has just gotten the right answer from one of his slower students.
"So," I said, "I'm to believe that the black sentiment in St. Louis was ‘I wish young Tyrone would stop robbing people, but I don’t want one of the people he robs to shoot him dead.’ Is that it?" I asked.
"You’ve got it exactly," he told me.
"But why? I mean, honestly, if some guy was married to my cousin and mugged people for a living, I’d figure he was making his own choices and could damn well take the chance of being blasted. I wouldn’t vote away my rights to help his sorry ass."
"What if it wasn’t just your one cousin’s husband, but 40% of all your male relatives between the ages of 18 and 25? What if that was, oh, I don’t know, a dozen people?" Suddenly I didn’t know what to say.
"You don’t feel that way," I said finally.
"I’m an Uncle Tom. I’ve recently come to realize that I now have very few black friends."
This statement filled me with an ineffable sadness. I know that we will get Right-To-Carry here in Missouri, even if the Governor vetoes it. That’s not the issue. And every black Missourian with a criminal record isn’t going to get shot by an armed citizen—we all know that, too. In over 98%** of the cases where a licenseholder encounters a criminal, he stops the crime without firing a shot. It’s that way in Atlanta and every other big city with a large black population in a Right-To-Carry state, so there’s no reason to think it would be any different in Kansas City or St. Louis.
But the O.J. trial and what the black businessman said has stuck with me. What hope can we have, I wonder, if the values that blacks hold dear are mutually exclusive of those held by whites?
Wow. Fascinating post.