Why do Black Members of Congress almost unanimously support abortion and gun control?

[tattedupboy]

Honestly, I hope this thread does not get deleted due to its sensitive nature. This was a topic I brought up once on PDO and it generated well over 50 responses. However, that was 3 years ago, and since then, congressional membership has changed.

I realize that the subject of Black Congress members and their general lack of support for gun rights is a taboo subject, so I figured that I, being a Black man, would be a good person to bring it up.

Whether most of you have ever been willing to discuss it or not, many of you probably already realize that Black members of Congress (43 in the 110th Congress, which includes nonvoting members Donna Christian-Christensen of the Virgin Islands and Eleanor Holmes Norton of Washington, D.C.) are overwhelmingly anti-gun and pro-abortion. I wanted to get an idea of just how much so, so I did a little research on all 43 members and here are my findings:

-no information was available for Donna Christian-Christensen (D-Virgin Islands) and Eleanor Holmes-Norton due to the fact that they are non voting members.

-no information was available for Yvette Clark (D-NY), Hank Johnson(D-GA), and Laura Richardson (D-CA), due to the fact that they all have only been in Congress since 2007.

-out of the other 38, 30 (79%) were solidly pro abortion and anti gun (all of these members had voting records of 80% or higher on legislation favored by pro choice groups as well as grades of D or lower by the NRA and GOA).

-Sanford Bishop of Georgia was the only one to get a grade of A by the NRA. Artur Davis (D-AL), despite supporting the AWB, received a lifetime grade of B, and Bennie Thompson (D-MS), whose gun record is mixed, has improved from a grade of F in 2002 to a grade of B in 2006.

What do you make of this information? Personally, I find it disturbing that these members of Congress, who claim to be defenders of civil rights, can support gun control in such large numbers, yet support abortion on demand, which kills far more Black babies every year than guns do.

Furthermore, virtually all Black members of Congress represent predominantly urban districts, which are places where support for gun rights tends to be a losing position, regardless of the person's race.

Your thoughts?

 

[kwo51]

Well Sir I am a white older man that has been asking that question for years. The black friends I have believe as I do on guns but disagree on adortion. I think lack of true freedom education is part of the problem.Free men own guns slaves don't.How many of us choise to be slaves to our government?

 

[rt48]

I've always wondered if Blacks embraced liberal positions because of the strong support that Liberals gave to the Civil Rights movement during the '50s and '60s.

 

[Sheldon]

Just a thought

I couldn't have something to do with the fact that they are mostly Democrats and embrace the Democrat ideal could it.

 

[echo_5]

This is, indeed, an intriguing and sensitive subject. Anytime blanket statements are made about a group of people- be prepared for extreme emotions and opinions from all sides. I don't know why or even if this is true although I will trust your research (you've done more than me). Understanding that the question pertains to members of congress and not all black people, here's one opinion: Black Americans have historically alligned themselves with the Democratic party, especially during the civil rights movement. We all know that the dems are anti-gun and pro-choice. All dems must conform due to the fact that we have a two party system. Success among third party candidates is rare and usually is the result of a popular incumbent losing their party's primary and running as an independent. Republican ideals like self-reliance and personal responsibility are possible because white people never had to fight racial prejudice to have an equal opportunity. -my $.02

P.S.
On a lighter note: tattedupboy, can black people get colored tattoos?

 

[tattedupboy]

My theory on Black support for gun control goes much deeper than simply being almost monolithically Democratic. Most Blacks reside in urban areas, which is also where crime tends to be concentrated; I ought to know, I reside in Gary, Indiana, a town which, despite having only about 97,000 residents, had 71 homicides in 2007 (which might not seem like much compared to New York's 492, but when you compare the homicide rates for the two cities, Gary's is .73 per 1,000 residents while New York's is .062 per 1,000 residents; Gary's is 11 times higher than New York's). In many urban areas around the country, particularly the slums in which Blacks tend to reside, drugs and gangs tend to run rampant, and so does crime. Because many urban residents see gangbangers, many of whom are heavily armed, on a daily basis, they have come to develop a fear of guns, and as a result, shun any politician who promotes gun rights. That is why gun grabbers, regardless of their race, tend to do well in urban areas.

 

[Puppy]

+ 3 on "it's just what liberals do!

 

[DrDavidM]

My guess would be a large part due to the urban raising that was mentioned. I think a large part of the urban population, regardless of race, are of this opinion. Perhaps it is how they are raised. They probably never had a chance to go hunting with their dads or brothers. Perhaps never even handled a gun. Education is the key. If I had never touched a gun and always been taught how evil they were and how they kill people I might feel different.

All this time Tattedupboy and I never even noticed you were black

 

[molonlabetn]

I've always wondered if Blacks embraced liberal positions because of the strong support that Liberals gave to the Civil Rights movement during the '50s and '60s.

Funny thing is, the majority of Democrats voted AGAINST it (Al Gore's daddy, for one).

Talk about misplaced values...

 

[The Gunny]

I will offer an OPINION, however I am in no way qualified to speak on behalf of this demographic as I am a white middle-aged man.

I think it has to do with the culture in which one is raised. In my own case I grew up on a farm in the North West. We had guns and we used them, we went hunting used them to control predators such as Coyotes and rodents etc. It was just another tool for doing a certain job. A powerfull tool and you had to be careful using it just like using a chainsaw. But it was only a tool not sinister symble of crime or something I would associate with crime anymore than a car would be associated with drunk driving. That may be the case here as the only ones seen using such a object are either criminals or the police.

 

[toreskha]

Politicians want to blame objects (guns and other weapons) as purveyors of death, rather than place the blame on people or specific social issues. Deflecting blame to guns means that local and state governments and people in more affluent neighborhoods who ignore the ghettos can safely absolve themselves of responsibility. Also, although many of the offenders themselves may not vote, they are often the children or relatives of voting constituents, who do not want to feel responsible for the problems that plague the society.

This approach results in the demonization of guns - essentially crucifying pieces of steel and plastic for the sins of the many. I live in Jacksonville, Florida; last year we had 152 murders, and we only have maybe 700,000 people in the city. It's a nice place in many ways, but we're a microcosm of this kind of thing. We some sprawling, squalid ghettos in some areas, and then on the opposite end, a few incredibly wealthy people.

Last year, we had a local football player who happened to be white (Tony Boselli) who has a nonprofit foundation, and wanted to take over and run an after-school program in the ghetto - at no cost to taxpayers! All they wanted was to sign a lease with the city to use the facility. Existing programs under Boselli's foundation are awesome, and most of the city is for it - except for E. Denise Lee, in whose district it is. Lee happens to be black, and she pulled out race as an issue and got onto this "Boselli isn't from around here, so he doesn't know what issues we have".

The real reason she doesn't want the program to go forward is because she was just recently elected after a hiatus off the City Council for a while, and she hasn't been involved from the beginning with the proposal - her predecessor had actually begun talks. In other words, she just doesn't want to take responsibility and accept something that could be of great benefit.

The situation is the same with other politicians' anti-gun positions. The main advantage of blaming guns is that when you accuse a gun of doing something bad, it can't directly speak up and defend itself. It's the ultimate scapegoat.

 

[HK4U]

It all depends. I know several members that are black that go to my church. None of them favor abortion or gun control. They are very conservitive.

 

[Hoot]

This is an interesting question. The easy answer is to say that black congressmen reflect the values of their constituency. That being the case it is easy enough to understand that in neighborhoods where crime and gun violence are rampant, it is a normal reaction to want to see the guns taken from the hands of the gang bangers. A good citizen living in these areas might reason that his/her owning a gun doesn't solve the problem. Some may even see gun ownership as only contributing to the problem and putting themselves at even greater risk.

And as far as abortion goes, I can easily understand the rationale. Ideally, the solution is to remove the causes that make abortion a viable choice. It is no easy task for a single mom to give a fatherless child much of a chance of making a decent life for him or herself. As long as young men believe it is "cool" to have multiple children with multiple women and support none of them, abortion is a reasonable choice.

These issues may be too pervasive to ever be remedied. I believe the government is responsible for part of the problem. I believe the media is partly responsible, black leadership or the absence thereof is partly responsible, and, of course, there is the matter of individual responsibility and the collective responsibility of all of us. To gauge the magnitude of our failure consider that a young man living in his hood has a greater chance of being killed or wounded than does the young man serving in Iraq. Moreover, the young man living in the hood has a five times greater probability of going to prison that he has of going to college. I could accept these figures more easily if we were talking about a third world country. But we are talking about the good old USA, and here such figures are inexcusable and totally unacceptable.

I am an old man. I was a young man when water fountains had a sign over them that said "colored" and "white," when the "back of the bus" rule applied, when a black man couldn't go to a movie or eat in a restaurant patronized by whites. That was all patently wrong. Yet I can also recall that the black communities at that time were composed of very strong family units, strong positive values, strong work ethics, and, despite the KKK, a much greater sense of security than is enjoyed by most black citizens today.

The civil rights legislation of the 60's corrected some wrongs but it ended up eroding many of the good things in black communities. We, and I mean all of us, mishandled the transitions badly. Today I think the brotherhood we had hoped for was only Martin's dream. It seems to me that antagonisms between races are as great or even greater than they have ever been.

Don't think for a minute that I am advocating turning back the clock to the Jim Crow days. That was a blot almost as reprehensible as slavery itself. And I might add that in the 50's I earned the ire of many of my contemporaries by strongly and actively supporting the civil rights movement. But it all was mishandled by everybody. We had a window of opportunity to fix things and we muffed it, both blacks and whites.

So today most blacks live in greater fear with less chance of a decent life than they have since Reconstruction. Many live in a virtual war zone. Others have had children killed by errant bullets, few feel safe in their own homes. I can easily understand why they want to abolish gun ownership and why they see a real need for abortion.

 

[toreskha]

These issues may be too pervasive to ever be remedied. I believe the government is responsible for part of the problem. I believe the media is partly responsible, black leadership or the absence thereof is partly responsible, and, of course, there is the matter of individual responsibility and the collective responsibility of all of us.

Indeed. It's a self-sustaining cascade failure; many members of the society have essentially sunk to the lowest possible level of economic, cultural, social and familial productivity. Try to pull any members up, and the rest pull down harder. Even if you manage to pull some members off, it increases the concentration of the problems in the system by a level that is inverse to the volume. This increase in concentration then works to attract more members, keeping the system as a whole in a homeostatic state (or possibly in a growth state). In other words, if you try to fix the problem, it automatically becomes stronger and draws in others to compensate.

The only way to fix the problem is to so directly overwhelm the system that it breaks apart and is unable to maintain any kind of cohesion. If two or three of "all of us" were available to work with each person from the ghetto, then we would have some hope of breaking through. Even a 1:1 ratio would be effective. Currently, it's more like one person helping 15 or 30 kids, and no one is helping the adults.

 

[speedracer815]

The wish to disarm black families is the one thing the NAACP and KKK have in common.

 

[createdeemcee]

I've always wondered if Blacks embraced liberal positions because of the strong support that Liberals gave to the Civil Rights movement during the '50s and '60s.

Hello All,

I am Black, A gun owner/lover/embracer and pro gun for sure. And as a business owner I am a repub all the way. My father raised me with guns and taught me how to first and formost respect them, as his father taught him. My family however express greater concearns than the ownership of guns. So unfortunatley they all liberals. And it does infact spinn from the 50-60's for equal rights. We were always poor/middle class during those days so I think its a generational gap in whats important and what is not. Good day all.!

 

[DarrellM5]

Jackson and Sharpton haven't helped any either.

 

[Ektarr]

Hiya, CDMC, and welcome to the party. You'll have fun!

What I find interesting is that people still give credit to the Democrat party for embracing a multicultural position, when - in recent history, at least - the Republican cabinets have had more diversity in their staffing than the Democrats. It may be that people - Democrats - remember the days of Kennedy, when the Conservative Democrat was easy to find. But there are other aspects of that...

Those days are gone, but I guess habits are hard to break. If my history is correct, people like Orval Faubus, George Wallace, Ross Barnett ("no school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your Governor"), Paul B. Johnson...all Democrats. In fact, go to Wickipedia and do a search for "List of Governors of ..." and plug in any Southern State. See what party the Governor represented during the heyday of the Civil Rights movement. Then, please tell me how the Democrats get credit for being at the head of the line when it came to Civil Rights.

It has been thoroughly established, and it's easy to find, that Gun Control is an offshoot (pun) of the Emancipation and, later, the Civil Rights movement...it hard to attack a man who has a gun pointed at you. The result was an effort to disarm the Black Man so he wouldn't be a threat. Being a Free Man was one thing...being able to actually defend yourself was another and didn't sit well.

Anyway, all this history is easy to find. I just was curious about the "Dems getting the credit" part.

 

[KenS]

I will offer an OPINION, however I am in no way qualified to speak on behalf of this demographic as I am a white middle-aged man.

I think it has to do with the culture in which one is raised. In my own case I grew up on a farm in the North West. We had guns and we used them, we went hunting used them to control predators such as Coyotes and rodents etc. It was just another tool for doing a certain job. A powerfull tool and you had to be careful using it just like using a chainsaw. But it was only a tool not sinister symble of crime or something I would associate with crime anymore than a car would be associated with drunk driving. That may be the case here as the only ones seen using such a object are either criminals or the police.

+1 Exactly my sentiments.
Ken.

 

[doublenutz]

It all depends. I know several members that are black that go to my church. None of them favor abortion or gun control. They are very conservitive.

Take it from this Black Man... nor do I. Like it was said earlier "FREE MEN OWN GUNS...SLAVES DO NOT!"