Armed citizens helped the cause of civil rights? It was an armed citizen who killed Martin Luther King, to give just one counter-example. But it was armed policemen who arrested the assassin. Other armed police and national guardsmen escorted black students into schools that wanted to defy court orders to enroll them. And it was an armed citizenry that allowed for a culture of condoned lynching throughout the south from the time of the Reconstruction to passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Indeed, it's the "black kid" you speak of who is most victimized by our gun culture. Just look at the statistics. It's not even close.
The idea that you will discourage rogue racist policemen from shooting innocent people by giving everyone a gun strikes me as silly. Indeed, you will give the rogue police a perfect defense because they can always point to the victim's gun and claim that they were acting in self-defense. It would be far better to weed out the bad cops then to make guns so readily available that the Adam Lanzas of the world can kill more people in a day than the police department kills in a decade. Do you actually believe the Newtown police department posed a bigger threat to its citizenry, and was more likely to kill them if they were unarmed, than Adam Lanza did?
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