The "Defund the Police" Movement is Making Gun Ownership More Popular

David Harsanyi has an article at The National Review that argues that The Riots and Protests Will Make Gun Ownership More Popular;

Not in a million years, not if all the nation’s prestigious public-relations firms were mobilized for the cause, could gun manufacturers have conceived of a more effective advertising campaign for their product than the “defund the police” movement.

Of course, realizing that a flagrantly anti-cop message might not sit well with a public still sweeping up shards of glass left by rioters in city centers across the country, Democrats and their media allies moved quickly to temper the movement’s message. But whatever “defund the police” ends up meaning in practice, it highlights a gaping disconnect between the Left’s anti-cop rhetoric and their anti-gun rhetoric about the Second Amendment.

Harsanyi goes on to demolish the typical liberal and Lefitst arguements that make no logical sense.

Gun-control advocates have long argued that trained police and military, but not civilians, have cause to be armed. We’ve been told that owning a gun is a dangerous fetish — not to mention useless in the face of a state armed with tanks and thermonuclear weapons. A civilized society relies on law-enforcement officers to safeguard the peace, not a bunch of unregulated slack-jawed yahoos. Even the notion of a constitutional right to individual self-defense is, they claim, a fraud perpetrated by the gun lobby and its collaborators.

The same people now inform us that cops are shock troops deployed by a systemically racist state to suppress African Americans. So much so that the public should contemplate abolishing, defunding, or “reimagining” law enforcement altogether. We frequently hear progressives hyperbolically assert that black Americans are being “hunted down” in the streets by nefarious cops. When the New York Times published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton in which he proposed that the president “employ the military,” if necessary, to protect city neighborhoods from rioters and looters, dozens of the paper’s staffers acted as if the words themselves were violence, tweeting, “This puts Black @nytimes staff in danger.”

So the question is: Why have liberals spent years demanding that we arm racist killer cops and disarm innocent black civilians? Why do they believe white supremacists should have guns but not shopkeepers?

Granted, most liberals won’t admit to any inconsistency in their position, because the liberal position has devolved into a perpetual game of Calvinball. But in the long run, this kind of argument is unsustainable.

As the Taney Supreme Court recognized in the Dred Scott decision, if the slaves were allowed to be freed, they could carry guns. Chief Justice Roger Taney was at great pains to twist the Constitution into pretzels to prevent Blacks from carrying guns for self defense just like other Americans. Liberals are often at pains to tell Blacks and women that they should not have guns. Yet, it is Blacks and women who benefit most from having a gun.

A rational person needn’t subscribe to either maximalist position, of course. Cops are granted great power, and they will sometimes abuse it. But this doesn’t make law enforcement “institutionally” racist. And the simple fact that Americans rely on law enforcement doesn’t mean they should be stripped of the ability to protect themselves, their property, or their family when necessary.

African Americans can offer a stronger case for the importance of the Second Amendment than any other group in the nation. The same gun arguments that 1960s Black Panthers were making in the Manhattan penthouses of celebrities would not be out of place at an NRA convention today. Nor would the contention of the great black journalist T. Thomas Fortune that a black man needs a gun to “defend his home and children and wife.” Nor would civil-rights leader Ida B. Wells’s claim that firearms “should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

In truth, a black American has a far better chance of being shot down by a criminal in his own neighborhood than by the local police officer. But if we accept that the law refuses to grant him the protections he deserves — nay, that it targets him — the case for the Second Amendment becomes stronger still.

David Harsanyi is, of course, an excellent writer. In addition, he has done a great deal of research on the subject of gun rights for his book The First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History With the Gun.  Please go read the article.

The Left may be trying to stampede us one direction, but Americans may not be going along with it.