NRA's Wayne LaPierre, Lindsey Graham play the 'racial scare' card in gun control debate
OPINION - NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre unleashed an incendiary manifesto on Thursday, describing America -- and Brooklyn, New York in particular -- as a virtual hellscape...
LaPierre’s ravings are meant to stoke conservatives into a frenzy of gun buying, which of course benefits his clients, the gun manufacturers and retailers, some of which he name-dropped in his “op-ed.” But Scarborough is on to something when he calls out the racial taint of LaPierre’s depictions of marauding Hispanic drug gangs and a version of New York City’s Brooklyn borough that hasn’t been operative since the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, and probably not even then.
His goal is clearly to prime the fears of people who live in parts of America that can’t relate to New York City, or to the growing Hispanic enclaves in the American west. Raise their anxieties, and you just might move more guns and ammo. Paint the picture of mass chaos and panic. Describe not just the kinds of individual bad guys who mow down schoolchildren with the American terror weapon of choice — the Bushmaster semi-automatic — but gangs of dark fiends, who you’d better not run into after dark. Best to get a Bushmaster semi-auto for yourself, Mr. and Mrs. Middle America.
Sadly, LaPierre is not the only one playing this game. During a Senate Judiciary Committee on January 30 on the subject of gun violence, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who faces a tough re-election effort in 2014, raised the specter of the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the acquittal in the Rodney King beating trial in explaining his need for an AR-15 rifle:
“In 1992 you had the riots in Los Angeles,” Graham said. “I think it was the King event, but you could find yourself in this country in a lawless environment through a natural disaster or a riot. … And the story was about a place called Koreatown. There were marauding gangs going through the area, burning stores, looting and robbing … and raping.”
Of course, there is no evidence of marauding rape gangs in Koreatown during the 1992 riots, but that’s not the point of Graham’s or LaPierre’s rants. The point is to terrify Americans who don’t fall into the ethnic categories their comments are targeting, into buying more, and deadlier, weapons out of fear.
While LaPierre lashes out against what he calls “gun prohibitionists,” there happens to be a long history of demonizing racial minorities in the interests of policy, including in the days before the United States passed actual Prohibition, against alcohol and narcotic drugs:
In a 1914 speech before the House, Rep. Richmond Hobson of Alabama warned that booze would make the “red man” savage and “promptly put a tribe on the war path.” He added, “Liquor will actually make a brute of a Negro, causing him to commit unnatural crimes.”
Twenty-three years later, while arguing for marijuana prohibition, Harry Anslinger also played on Americans’ fear of crime and foreigners. The Bureau of Narcotics chief spun tales of people driven to insanity or murder after ingesting the drug and spoke of the 2 to 3 tons of grass being produced in Mexico.
“This, the Mexicans make into cigarettes, which they sell at two for 25 cents, mostly to white high school students,” Anslinger told Congress.
Now, it is the opponents of lawmaking, this time on gun control and gun safety, who are playing the “racial scare” card.
Follow Joy Reid on Twitter at @TheReidReport.
