If you want to own slaves, then you'd better arm yourself.

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"If you want to own slaves, then you'd better arm yourself."

This is the one truth that ties America's perchance for gun violence to its history of racial slavery and racism. It is no accident that Trayvon Martin and the five black people shot in Oklahoma were attacked in the former Confederate States or allied territories.

Certainly, the hundred year push west against an often hostile indigenous people was another reason Americans became a uniquely armed people but that was mainly done by bodies of armed men, militias, and mainly at the frontier.

Maintaining slavery required a much finer integration of fire arms into the society, essentially, they aways had to be as close at hand as the slaves were.

I have to go now and really tend to business or else I may become another one of those homeless old black men that America is so good at creating. I can't do my usual in-depth dairy on this or be around for responses. I just wanted to follow up on what I said in an update to yesterday's diary, which I will repeat below the fold, with one example.

I don't have time to do the research and present you with the facts but I'll bet if you look into it [Google is your friend] you will find all things guns, # owned, # of deaths, etc. concentrated in the Ole Confederacy.

From Racist killers arrested in Tulsa

I'm going down to the beach now. Easter and Venice Beach is in it's glorious. Eighty degrees and the Venice Drum Orchestra is playing in front of the Venice Bistro. I badly need this right now so I won't pass it up.

But before I take my leave I want to apologize. I think I was a little too hard on Horace. He broke the story here in the middle of the night, that's the main thing.

I just think racism side must not be ignored. IMHO, more than any other single question. I believe that this whole enterprise known as the United States of America, succeeds or fails depending on how we resolve this question. To me that means, and to this extent I am an American exceptionalist, that this whole experiment known as humanity on the planet Earth, hangs in the balance.

The reason for that has mainly to do with slavery, by which I mean the most primitive form of human exploitation incorporated into the foundations of the most advanced capitalist country in the world. Racism is the whole social, political, cultural and most importantly ideological product of that economic engine.

Anyone who thinks that we have somehow put this question behind us is a fool.

BBL