Was a very unique approach to a very desperate situation and he was left hanging out to dry. And he was able to hold off an army that outnumbered his probably 100 to one if not 100,000 to one. For more information on both tvs visit from china to tennessee and the many other cities visited by her content vehicles, go to cspan. Org local content. Up next on booktv, after words with the former Senior Researcher of columbia university. Nicholas johnson in his book negroes and the gun the black tradition of arms. In it, the Law School Professor discusses the tradition of African Americans using firearms to defend their families and communities. A tradition that dates back to reconstruction. He argues that the nonviolence of the civil rights help to bury this fact of black history. This program is about one hour. So this strikes me as an important intervention in three ways. One of the black Freedom Movement and over the years has been increasingly revising the way that we understand the role of violence related to nonviolence. The other intervention is cultural in terms of who we see or who we think of when we think of gun owners, and also how we think about black individuals. Finally there is a Public Policy implication for the presentation of the black tradition of arms. So i look forward to really getting into those three areas with you. And before i was interested in hearing a little bit about your background and how you got into this and how did you arrive at this topic . Im happy to be here. I think your sense about the way you encounter the Current Situation is accurate. And there are two influences. I grew up in rural on culture, which was black gun culture. So everyone that i knew, the good people of the community, they own guns and so did everyone honest in that community. Really quite unapologetically. And so when i got to law school, i found out that it was a quite different impression about something that i took as being a clear right and importance of the resources and so there was this tension in the way and i was doodling with what i knew in my bones versus what i had heard in law school and the cultural response to the firearms issues that i got in the venues that i was operating under after this. And certainly the sense in the early 80s when i was there was oh, well, the Second Amendment thing, we dont really need to talk about that. And it was sort of a grave dismissal is something that was culturally quite important to me in the community that i had grown up way. That is interesting. I grew up in rural west virginia. My grandparents had a garden. They did not have a telephone. They were half an hour away from any sort of police response. And they also use guns in terms of daily life. There was how killing and keeping the tests out of the garden. And a clear recognition in the community for matters of personal security that the state was deep in the background and almost irrelevant. So in your book you say you tried to recover this tradition and put it in a long historical content. So i wanted to hear when you talk about the black tradition of arms, what exactly is this black tradition of arms . Guest it is almost a repeat of what i suggested. It is those increasing gun ownership and carrying guns and armed selfdefense as a sort of practical necessity and an important response to that period of state failure. It is a place in any sort of encounter where the state is just not able to respond. And so you find is occurring very early on. So as he set the book actually, after the introduction which focuses on the case, it talks in the chapter about the earliest iterations of this, fugitive slaves acquiring guns and fighting off sleep captures, sometimes very successfully in ways that are defining our expectations of how escapes escaped slaves were treated in a kind of assistance that they got. And what we find is that this tradition goes back as far as we can trace this experience. Okay, so i think that we are familiar with this and became the turning point coming into itself. So what i knew less about was outside of today. And well from central pennsylvania. And there are lots of things in the first chapter where you get this on pursuers and you dont hear anything more. And William Parker, at one point or another that people will contend for contest this. And hugo actually his own narrative when he learned to this and he was sheltering two or three slaves in indiana. Including the 1850 version. And those who found out that this fellow had gotten one and come to parkers homestead with two u. S. Marshals. Including those from the surrounding community gathered together with guns and cutlery and one of the slave catchers was dead. So William Parker and the fugitives are running north and i didnt actually know the details of all of this and parker says that we were sheltered at a friends house in rochester and he says that these people and he names parker explicitly, i helped them across and you couldnt write it better. And he takes out of his pocket, he called it the revolver snatched from the late hand. It looks like the ending scene of the movie. Including less detail and some of them appear in william steeles account. The founder of the sound of the underground railroad who wrote this long exposition on what is going here. Showing firing slaves come from including this original account. Host so one of the distinctions that you make is the distinction between selfdefense and Political Violence. Some wondering if you could walk us through this. And how you are defining Political Violence and why this is important. Okay. So it is important and it is my primary analytical contribution. So this book is based upon a scholarly piece that i published including what i show over and over again. Is that black people made a distinction between Political Violence in selfdefense and they saw Political Violence as folly. And by this, it articulated in different details from using different details by different people. And what they meant was trying to advance the race, trying to get arguing the right to vote or access to school. All of the things we think about when you think about group rights. The idea is that we are not going to prevail using violence on the sort of question. But selfdefense is this individual response to a threat that occurred within that window where it is impossible for the state, even if the state turns out to be not a malevolent state. Even if they take this motivated by good well. You have to recognize that its a matter of physics were the state cant respond. And on those sorts of fundamental selfdefense scenarios, there is a long increase of firearms and armed selfdefense is a private resource and that is the dichotomy that runs throughout the book. Host so is this more like a fashion that people have floated back and forth . Many of the people that you cover in the 19th century. Were the acts of violence or an aggressive act of violence or by the state itself. And so was that selfdefense and Political Violence . Or can we not see that as political . Guest your point is well taken and it allows me to sharpen the last answer. So in the first chapter i entitled it boundary land and what im trying to evoke is this notion that there is this area of contested or contestable scenarios where there are people engaged in violent acts of either selfdefense or if you push it, you can say that that is really getting to the range of Political Violence. What we see rather than people talking about being on one side or the other of Political Violence versus selfdefense, what we see as the conservative and cautious members of the Community Talking about selfdefense and talking about arms. The level of strength that recognizes the possibility that you could easily have something that started off as a legitimate selfdefense force were allowed into a scenario where you think this is Political Violence and we have harmed the movement and harmed the quest for freedom by striking out in a way that will produce this Political Violence backlash. So it is attention that runs through the conversation in dc by the time we get to the end of it as im sure we will have a chance to talk about. When we get to the end of the movement and we see this habit into what i call modern orthodoxy. It draws this to the rise including the use of black radicals in some areas that we have to say and do you see this debate within the community about whether that is a legitimate act of selfdefense or not. That is very interesting. So my sense is that within this it was an easier explanation and it had maybe Legal Protection to it in ways that Political Violence did not. Thats right. It essentially revolutionary. We are going to upset this gameboard and you see it over and over again. You see roy wilkins talking about it in the 20th century and you also see them talking about it at the turn of the century and ida wells talking about in the 19th century. Thomas worked in talking about it at the end of the 19th century and lots of other people that they may have not heard of. Its frustrating in the same way that the idea that you are a 10 minority and you are not going to win a revolution or achieve your goal through violence. But that doesnt mean that you give up an elimination in need for individual selfdefense. Host one of the things that i thought was very interesting was the focus on women who participated in the tradition. And so tell us about the women who made up this tradition. Guest sure. In some sense it was not a purposeful effort is just that they were there. And theres a bit of background. Ive been working on these issues for two decades. And every six months i picked up a new book and think, well, there he is again. Fifteen years ago and thinking and there are lots of scholars out there that starts to a firmness. Ida wells is well known to lots of viewers of the show in the book and she was one of the foremost antilynching advocates in the 19th century. She was a small pine double woman. And just a firebrand. And so she goes to memphis and is a newspaper editor there and she ends up getting chased out because of some inflammatory thing that she had written about lynching. She goes to new york and then she is wellknown. So even people who arent familiar with this tradition of arms, most of them are familiar with her that they will deserve a place of honor in every black home. The winchester rifle. So sort of making this statement, for she had survived an episode of violence with the lynching of tom maas and three others. He was one of her best friends in memphis and she was also commenting on two episodes of averted lynchings one in kentucky and another in jacksonville, florida. And she was going about her efforts in making it by todays standards inflammatory statement, she was talking about what people in the community were doing in response to racist terrorists. The other thing that we know is that she has a quote that talks about how she bought a pistol and carried it in their other references advocating selfdefense and in preparing herself. And as we move through the history, over and over again. One would not think of rosa parks, people called the first lady of little rock. She shuffled them in one of my favorites is that she captures the dynamic that youre talking about with Political Violence on one end and selfdefense on the other. So in response to people who are questioning her about the abuse and she had had a horrible early life and she said you just have to love. What shes talking about is a response. And did exactly what you would think of in terms of this thing that hating just makes you weak. Then someone asked her the second question of how did you survive so many years of abuse and so forth. And without missing a beat she says i will tell you why. I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom in the first one of these folks that wants to throw dynamite on my porch will write his mother again. Or something to that effect. And so it captures this over and over again. The dynamic that we are talking about. And it is one of just a few of the women. But the book, really as i said, it spills over with women who are just as it engaged in this tradition. And it seems to me that it is an illustration of what the undercurrent of the tradition is. That is that if the threat arises, its not a question over whose role it is to pick up the gun and engage in an act of selfdefense. If youre by yourself in the threat comes, you will respond in a way that is consistent with countless of whether you are a man or a woman and its an interesting reflection of this long dynamic between black men in black women because there is a degree of quality and terms of this. Host if you could tell us a little bit about stagecoach mary, that would be fascinating. Guest yes, at one point she was called blackberry as well. And she starts in tennessee and eventually she finds herself in cascade, montana. Shes 6 feet tall, she is 200 pounds, shes a dark black woman and she is in cascade and operating in the west in the latter part of the 19th century and this includes the wife like this, it is completely different from stagecoach mary. She turns out to be an iconic local hero and thats not to say that she didnt face instances where she picked up a gun in selfdefense. They were working at a place where she was in charge and they said we dont have to take orders from a slave and she is diplomatic of person that did the work and then he comes and sucker punches her. And she does herself off and said go get your gun and meet me behind the barn. And the men are hooting and hollering and they are all aghast and she gives him the first move and she kills him. And that is the beginning of the legend of black mary. Theres a very nice book on this and there actually was a snippet of film trying to depict her back in the 1970s and it goes on and she has other sorts of episodes. She becomes famous as the stagecoach but untrained driver for wells fargo. And while she has these altercations she is not lynched. It is not an episode of violence. Where they lose the award and they end up in some episode. She becomes a hero that even gary cooper had the famous quip elevating her as one of his childhood heroes in the early 20th century and ultimately they got together and build her new house. And its another episode showing that you cannot read a stereotype that some of them are having at a different time. So this is a surprise and it defies many of the expectations that people have about how to survive during these various periods. Host during the 19th century we have talked about the distinction between selfdefense and political balance that could really get blurred. The distinction becomes clear and so im thinking of tulsa, rosewood. Can you talk about how those illustrated the distinctions between the two . Sure. You are right to see this and i have talked exclusively in the book about the period preslavery. Lots of advocacy from many of them and others who are the vanguard of the early Freedom Movement and they were unapologetic about the idea that slavery was a state of war. So at that time there were lots of statements saying that we just have to fight and theres no reason to be reticent about Political Violence because we dont have any Political Rights and we are not really operating from the system. After the civil war and certainly during the period of reconstruction were there a sense that we have this kind of promising political opportunity, we start to see people backing off a bit in terms of the rhetoric of Political Violence that still all of these individual selfdefense and by 1876 when reconstruction and then we have another bump in the transformation and now we are at a point where the concept becomes much more important because people have lost their Political Rights with some sense of what they have and its all that they will get. And its a bleaker time and so you start to see just as a residual matter, the loss to selfdefense rather than Political Violence and you move into the 20th century and there is a sort of concern that for things to get better we have to proceed in a fashion that will evoke the tools of the democratic process and may be the american population. And so in a variety of ways you have instances that could move into the range of Political Violence and the surrounding redick are those who are sort of shaping the story with surrounding rhetoric who commented on the tulsa riots and he cast it as a selfdefense rather than as Political Violence. So you see the same thing in the crisis magazine about the episode and rosewood and lots of other lynchings and some of this comes from the boys who is the preeminent intellectual group. So he talks about a variety of episodes and du bois actually urges them for selfdefense, people that were facing us and there are a couple of interesting things that we had whether he talks about the necessity of selfdefense and then he goes on and says that we should not and cannot seek to achieve reform by violence. So hes very cognizant that 10 of the population is not going to get their political agenda executed in a serious way through violence. But he is also urging people to take a gun in selfdefense and it is sometimes surprising. In the early versions of the book people would say du bois . And then i had to explain how he picked up a shotgun at the beginning of the implant of riots and its been quite an inflammatory statement with his willing willingness to defend his family in this way postmarks or you have been a part of this long tradition of arms in selfdefense. One of the reasons that people are aware of it is certainly what happened within the Civil Rights Movement and the push towards not being in civil disobedience. And so can you talk a little bit about what happens to this tradition of arms during the height of what we would consider desegregation in the south . Guest this is a time and the book addresses this in two ways, the first chapter actually talks about a part of this that is central because it reflects the statement about the origins that really crystallizes this that i have been talking about with the difference between Political Violence in selfdefense. And as we get into chapter seven, which is the longest chapter of the book, over we see people engaging in this question of how much we can protect and demonstrate that this is an effort to achieve Political Goals nonviolent way. At the same time we have this long tradition in the rural areas as we go along of gun ownership and carrying guns and we try to summarize it in a couple of different ways. The first chapter i talk about this conflict between Robert Williams whose memoir, negroes with guns, the title of this book is a variation on that theme. Williams and can end up in this debate with this widespread exchange of essays. The genesis is that he made inflammatory statements after a trial where a white man was acquitted of raping a black woman and he made some statements that the naacp considered to be advocacy of Political Violence and wilkins removed Robert Williams from his post of president of the naacp. He saw that removal to the National Board of the naacp and at the annual meeting there is this debate. Ultimately the removal of him is upheld. But in the process there is just as wide engagement from across the country and branches of the naacp writing in the path of statements in the crisis magazine and there is a significant engagement of this question as to whether Robert Williams stepped over the line into advocacy of Political Violence. A lot of people disagree. He crystallized the debate by saying that you have three things. And its pure pacifist and him say that its a religious commitment that very few people are ever going to achieve and requires extraordinary discipline. And they never urged others to condemn them for achieving that sense of nonviolence. And then he says there is selfdefense. He said even gandhi did not condemn them and they may even command this kind of grit and it shows. And then he says for purposes of what we are doing, that is the freedom to achieve Political Goals, we have to press through marching in a nonviolent demonstration to achieve our goal. And roy wilkins is still under pressure and he argues it is the single issue in the Robert Williams case that this is not an issue of selfdefense. And he said that that is not what they advocated, they advocated Political Violence and we will have none of it. At the same time he said the naacp credit organizational achievement on supporting those who stood up with firearms and defended themselves to talk about this case with franklin. In the case was actually part of the impulse for funding the legal defense. All of those early 20th century cases, where they said that we are going to support it those that have used firearms in selfdefense by the 1960s and 1970s and we are not going to be in the business of violence. This is a place where that distinction that runs through the book really becomes quite crucial. Because it is the effort of radicals to conflate those two things and i argue in the book that pushes the black establishment away from a long tradition and pushes them towards a kind of embrace of this new modern orthodox means of supporting restrictions. Host i definitely look forward to more of this after the break. Are you on the go . Eight Asif Ali Zardari is available via podcast. The booktv. Org and click on the podcast on the upper left side of the page. Select which podcasts you would like to download and listen to after words when you travel. Host picking back up where we were talking about. The challenge that was posed as people understood it. As a result of the rise of activists who maybe didnt see the distinction between Political Violence. Selfdefense is politics and it seems like this is a political idea. And the question is now the defense of others and so can you talk about the tradition with the emergence of these ideas . Sure. There was always this worry and always the danger that acts in individual selfdefense into Political Violence and i have talked about countless institutions where theres an there is an episode of selfdefense that leads to backlash that becomes a swirl of violence that you have to characterize. Words groups of people fighting one another over something and an idea and an episode. So its not an imminent threat that youre just fighting off your individual situation. So that has always been in part of the worry and a weakness, if you will, with a Conceptual Foundation that was running throughout the tradition and it comes out in the 1960s as we find not only are the blacks protesting and still defending themselves individually against terrorist attacks, but also the cities are on fire and within that context you have aggressively radical organizations and the black panthers are emblematic and there are lots of others that are less well known and they really crystallizes the problem for the black moderates. So what you see coming to a head at this point is the naacp and the urban league all vying for influence during the early part of the 1960s and if you get to the late 1960s it really becomes the dominant organization and fundraising and part of that is the radical shift, for example, of the core because at that point they are antiwar. So those people looking to fund the Civil Rights Movement, the naacp becomes only the most viable option in the record levels of fundraising and part of this is outside supports coalescing and casting off a push into the end of the more radical organizations. One of the things that it is important to think about in terms of the transition is who are the groups and those entities that are pressing this new mainstream black movement. Those are start of the new Political Class that looks at the tradition of arms and recognizes that that is being conflated with the new radicals and you are starting to see this policy separation and its hard to say that they have the right to arms in this crucial thing. Especially when others are on the other side of selfdefense and Political Violence and they are exactly the same thing. So does this turmoil and this time where this new emerging prevailing black leadership make a decision about embracing this tradition of arms postmarks of a further distinction is put up again. Dc does coming from the black Panther Party or even malcolm x. In a kind of programmatic way . Right . Well, this is part of that tradition. Dc this diminishing the tradition . And is this just the tradition of eminent selfdefense or doesnt have space even if its something that people find highly disagreeable. Does it have an aggressive or political selfdefense in this . What i talk about in the radical sense is clearly an important thing. One of the things that can happen here if you can use it as a way of trying to capture different aspects of the phenomenon and then it kind of takes on its own weight of its own inertia. I dont need to say that the efforts and advocacy is not a part of the story. It is clearly part of a significant catalyst that causes a significant change in this mainstream attitude of firearms ownership and use. And in this normative question, can we embrace the radicals in the radical attack in some way, and that, when i tried to do in the book is a biscuit have it. You let people make up their own minds about this. Host dc part of the tradition as well or do you see it is harming a . Guest that has always been a part of the tradition in the sense that they always have disagreements within the community about how far a certain episode had moved into the boundary land with advocacy or action that we would say constitute a political and Robin Williams saw that. You saw lots of episodes in the late 19th century where people are pressing harder than others. And there is a great publisher that was criticized by other black publishers is pushing harder on the boundary lines of advocating certain sorts of actions so that there was a situation after a lynching in georgia, he says and it is actually called, the shooting stand rather than running high policy. Something like that. Almost like stand your ground. Yes. In other publisher said that this is insane. What are you talking about. Youre not just talking about selfdefense but Political Violence that we have always thought was crazy. And so this has always been part of the conversation going back and forth. And one that is part of the physical dynamics that some people would engage in that members of the community would look at and say that is really over the line. Political violence knows that theres going to be retaliation and backlash and thats bad for the community. So what happens in the 1960s was the rise and not on television, of course. People are getting stage to make these statements the become more widely publicized that they mightve been six years earlier. And now what you see is this tension that has always been at the heart of what i call the black tradition of arms, coming to a head in generating a scenario where the new Leadership Class has to make a choice. Do we align with the Progressive Coalition, and this is the early 1970s, exactly the point in time when the newly minted national guncontrol Movement Comes to the forefront. So do we align with our progressive allies . Suppliers, right, supply control. Theres a black tradition of ours but theres also a an american tradition of disarmament that started in the 1600s in virginia even before slavery became the exploitation as it was there was already this kind of distinction made between africans who were in the socalled new world and whites that out lot of their own in weapons and so there is this i wonder why do you think and then of course ronald reagan, has governor, one of his reasons for pushing through, pushing for gun control as a response to the black Panther Party. So how is it that this modern orthodox, as you call it, the mainstream civil rights leadership is able to embrace the disarmament even with this history why do you think that people did not say this is dangerous . Guest this is complicated and ive written a lot about it. One of the odd things as the gun control movements really sort of touched people into a scenario where you are relying more and more and more on state and local governments to provide your security. And that is an odd perspective to take for people that have had such long of reasons to distrust this thing. The first answer though quite clearly is the notion of the political coalitions generating black political power so what you see in the 1970s and 1980s is the Progressive Coalition is the place where the black political power rests, and as a member of that sort of governing class in the black political establishment and you are going to make lots of sacrifices and in some sense to the degree people tell you listen, you are now in charge of washington, d. C. Or detroit and you have these problems with crime here is a fury come here is an idea with a set of protocols and legislation that will bring peace to the neighborhoods that are burdened by violence. And again it is quite clear that in theory, the idea of supply control resonate. There is going to be no crime in this room. That is the impulse on which the supply control argument rests. The problem in putting into practice and the reason that it has not succeeded in the u. S. And has generated instances of familiar and that i talked about in the last chapter that we already have 25 million guns. So talking about taking the supply of guns down to zero or asking where did that person get that are our distractions and i think its taken a while. We are now at the state that people now that we have this overt embrace of the constitutional right to arms again, pressed by the black plaintiffs, we are now probably at a stage where those in the black Political Class have to step back and reevaluate. At least i would hope that people would give some additional fought to the policies that have really been in place as dominant since the 1970s. Youre other point about why people havent looked at the history of gun control and fought well it really is the history of a kind of race based distinction starting from the 1600s moving into the 1950s and even the 1960s there is a famous quote and the title with an article that never intended to apply to the white population that is the statement made by a judge in South Carolina about a series of gun controls and there was a white fellow that they prosecuted and the judge said im dismissing it but i know about these. They were never intended to apply to the white population. So it is emblematic of the things that also were occurring under the bolack code of jim crow and even places where the statute was not explicitly discriminatory. What we find is that there was a quite discriminatory administration so even Martin Luther king in montgomery in 1956 in the beginning of the montgomery bus boycott there was a bomb that went off and they would come around with the arrogance to sort of defend it and then the next day one of the other reference from the surrounding area, they would go down and apply for permits to carry pistols and his permit is denied because he didnt show good cause. That is an example of the scenario of the discretion that is vested in neither a share for judge or prosecutor as an example of a kind of blatant discrimination in terms of the impact even on the face of the statute law is neutral and ultimately people have to make up their own mind about whether they are impacted in terms of the current decisions about policy and whether they are influenced by that history. It influences lots of people that i know but for the Political Class i think that if you are facing an immediate crisis, its hard to look back and say im going to avoid a policy measure because its intention with things that happened 70 years ago. Host part of it is the crossing of racial lines that does alter how we see this. And so when you look around and see the most vocal advocates for gun control, it is usually for the acquisition or the use of guns for violence for the criminalize black or brown face, and when you see as you talk about the calls for disarmament is to disarm the criminalize face. But whether the site is calling for the protection of the Second Amendment doesnt seem to be speaking and the side calling for gun control is do you see what im saying . You can tell a little bit about those cases and why they were significant because what is interesting to me is much of your book and shaving the tradition focused on the cross racial violence, but in the case it was of the center of racial violence. So again, this goes to my argument or the sense that the advocates for gun control are advocating when that received assailant or aggressor is black. Host this is interesting. Part of the responses we have to appreciate that lots of this information and story is coming to us from a filter of popular media where you get a snapshot of the claim that someone is making about the right to arms coming and that sort of caricatures the debate. One of the last things i talk about in the book and i will do a couple things. The surprising diversity in the community on the right to arms, and there was a recently the poll that asked two questions basically, blackandwhite whether they supported more gun control or more than rights and if we should err in favor of one or the other. And why its split i believe Something Like 6040 but blacks actually split the getaway meaning 40 of the Community Survey to said they thought more attention should be paid to gun rights. Thats a remarkable component of the Community Embracing what one would say is a kind of traditional gun rights of view. Its a much bigger slice than you would presume given the degree of the Democratic Party support from. The details are more interesting than the sort of character you get from the 32nd flash on some tv shows. The next thing about this, and you mentioned most people know in 2008 and 2010, the court first of all in the case in the District Of Columbia and second and mcdonnell versus chicago the court upheld what ive been arguing and lots of people have been arguing the Second Amendment does guarantee an individual right to arms. So the first case was out of washington, d. C. And the case was initially in the District Of Columbia. Shall the parker, a Community Activist who was laboring under what was the most draconian, the most stringent gun control measure in the country. Washington, d. C. Said handguns are band and cannot have one for selfdefense because you have to keep it in your house disassembled so no practical defense in washington, d. C. Shelley parker was by the lawyers interested in the macdonald case. I am an activist who has been threatened by basically young men that she described as thugs. She was afraid of them and they came after her and at one point she had a little gate and a fenced in area to keep them safe. She said im looking for a tool that will help me survive and maybe prevail during the period before help can get here and that was essentially the claim pressed to the United States court and they said once the court is now called heller they said yes there is an individual right to arms to keep and bear arms and the constitution means that, with limitations we are still phasing out. The same thing were similar things happened in chicago, so chicago is a case, otas mcdonald, and the reason the court takes up the second case is that the first was in the District Of Columbia and the first case established for purposes of limiting the federal government, the second still wishes this individual right but it wasnt clear if you have the application of the Second Amendment to the state. The mcdonald case established that proposition and Otis Mcdonald was a 72yearold black man army veteran who was living in a neighborhood that where again he was besieged by young black men and he said i want again for the same reason Shelley Parker wanted a gun and the court all devotee upheld his claim. Host in the final moments weve traced the tradition of black arms and how its been challenged in the mid20s at century and now the current kind of discourse over gun rights and the protections many of whom saw at the hands of the violence, how do you see that long rich tradition of farms being revised in this time that we have left . People have to make up their own mind about this. I tried to get lots of data. This is something that i teach that deals with the details on the questions of the risks and the benefits. Weve got all kinds of data about the benefits of the firearms, defensive gun uses in the millions per year. You dont hear about them because they are brandishing episodes where no shots were fired and the deterrent value of the firearms chronicle by the centers for Disease Control and National Crime victims