Republicans’ Latest Anti-Gun-Control Excuse: It Hurts Minorities

If you’ve paid any attention at all to the Republican Party recently or not so recently, one thing you’ve probably noticed is that racism is basically one of its core tenets. Whether it’s suppressing the Black vote, glorifying lynchings, whitewashing history, or just coming out and saying they’re afraid of Black people, members of the GOP’s feelings about nonwhite people are clear. Yet according to Republican lawmakers, they care deeply about minorities and other disenfranchised groups, which is why they are…opposing gun control legislation.

During Tuesday’s hearing on gun violence—in the wake of two mass shootings in the span of a week—Senator Mike Lee explained that the party refuses to restrict access to guns because it would infringe on the rights of minority communities. Per BuzzFeed:

GOP senators on Tuesday framed gun control as part of a long and racist history of restricting the rights of minority groups during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence. While they still put forward traditional arguments that gun laws infringe on Second Amendment rights and punish law-abiding gun owners, much of their questions to witnesses focused on minority communities needing guns to protect themselves. “Very often, inevitably in American history but even prior to American history, we’ve seen it’s rarely the empowered, very rarely the wealthy or those with political connections to the government, who have their rights interfered with,” said Republican senator Mike Lee.

Chris Cheng, a witness invited by Senate Republicans and a sports shooter who won the season four championship of the History Channel show Top Shot, related gun control to a historic pattern of infringing on minority rights that included the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. “We need to defend ourselves,” he said. Congress is not currently considering any legislation to take away guns or bar any group of people from owning them, though President Joe Biden did call Tuesday to renew the ban on assault weapons enacted in 1994 that expired a decade later.

This new and bizarre argument for doing nothing to try and prevent gun violence in the U.S. follows the standard ones trotted out by Republicans every time the discussion of stronger gun control measures comes up, which include, as New York magazine notes, “New laws wouldn’t have prevented this”; “It takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun”; and “Guns protect our freedom,” among others. Elsewhere in anti-gun-control arguments that make no sense, Senator John Kennedy told Fox News on Tuesday, “In my judgment, we don’t need more gun control, we need more idiot control.” (Apparently Kennedy liked this line so much that he essentially repeated it.)

Yes, there’s definitely an “idiot control” problem in the U.S., though Kennedy is apparently unaware of where it’s actually coming from.

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