Quick Hits - American Slavery, Cop Pay, & NY Handguns
Whether you’re celebrating it, protesting it, or considering it in some other way, one must realize that the new U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down New York’s conceal and carry gun regulations is certainly bound to be impactful. The ruling is consequential in large part because of how sweeping it is.
The majority opinion ruling, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, establishes some noteworthy things, including that the Court considers the U.S. Constitution’s 2nd Ammendment’s central purpose to be the securing of individual self-defense rights, as well that the Court considers the original historical context of the amendment being written and enacted to be more important, feasible, and desirable a goal than any modern-day considerations that might be taken into account when considering gun laws.
Read the entire opinion for yourself, here.
Gun Control, but for whom…
This writer does not happen to agree with a host of the assertions the Supreme Court makes in its ruling on New York’s gun laws and regarding the Bill of Rights more broadly. Nor do I share the Court’s convenient fetishization and valorizing of “original intent” and context regarding the fraught, and oppressive Constitution and its Bill of Rights, written by wealthy, White, slave-owning authors.
Still, as I write in the new issue of The International magazine, the typical liberal discourse around gun regulation in the U.S. is limiting. It never seems to consider as a threat the gun ownership, use, and gun killings committed by our militarized police forces, for example. American police departments are the most lethal of any wealthy nation on earth, and feed into a for-profit, literal slave carceral system that enriches the powerful off the unfair targeting, misery, and forced labor of mostly poor, and people of color.
So, as long as New York Police can walk around with guns on their hips, the regular New Yorkers they terrorize on a daily basis certainly deserve to carry some as well. I’m certainly in favor of the latter being unarmed, just as soon as we disarm the former.
The dangers of abolishing the police
There are, however, legitimate concerns about defunding, demilitarizing, or abolishing American police. For example, if we abolish American policing, who will work with Neo Nazi groups to terrorize gay people at Pride events, as uniformed police officers did this month in North Carolina?
More Copaganda from Democrats
Sadly, even those who brand themselves as progressives, like Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams campaign on pro-police lies. Abrams announced this week that her next campaign for Governor of her state will prominently feature a pro-police plan that will increase funding for already bloated police budgets.
To run cover for her embarrassing bowing to one of the nation’s most demonstrably racist police forces, Abrams took to twitter to lie. “Law enforcement are often paid less than a living wage, and that is wrong,” she wrote.
“We must raise pay for officers and address violent crime…”.
Abrams is lying. It simply isn’t true that U.S. police officers get paid less than a living wage. Lying about that is wrong.
The average salary of American law enforcement officers in every state is well beyond a living wage, and is also much higher than the overall national average salaries, while still being a statistically less dangerous job than food delivery.
American Slavery, in 2022
American police are the kidnapping force for what is, at best, a modern Jim Crow apartheid system, and what is increasingly an outright slave system. Not only does prison-slave labor produce over $11 billion worth of goods that are sold at a high profit for private corporations, but U.S. prisoners/slaves are also forced to do dangerous work for all of us, while not being able to do that same work for a living once they have served their time and are out of prison.
A photo is being widely circulated on social media this week that gives a dark look into our merciless slave nation.
As their orange suits indicate, this is an image of literal prisoner-slaves being forced into fires. After serving their time and performing slave labor to save us from fires, our country makes it virtually impossible for ex-cons to become fire fighters for a living.