By Timothy Wheeler, MD
With all the ill-will, misunderstanding, and downright meanness swirling around the outcome of the George Zimmerman trial I was glad to see this article in the Los Angeles Times today. The Times even managed to put aside its longstanding bias against gun owners—almost, anyway—to take a look at one of the NRA’s new public faces, Colion Noir. A hip young African-American attorney from Houston, Noir doesn’t fit the L.A. Times stereotype of American gun owners—“old, fat, white guys,” as Noir himself puts it. Neither does perennial gun rights champion the Rev. Kenn Blanchard, who in the article defends Noir from predictable charges of “selling out to the white pro-gun establishment.”
Inadvertently displaying her own bigotry, Los Angeles Times writer Molly Hennessy-Fiske mused “perhaps Noir’s rise says more about the NRA’s acceptance of minorities than the group’s ability to woo them.” I’ll bet this would be news to NRA Board of Directors member and NBA All-Star Karl Malone. As a Jewish woman dedicated to the right of self defense, former NRA president Sandra Froman would likely be surprised, too. I’ve been an NRA member since the 1970s, and I don’t recall seeing any checkbox for race, religion, or gender on the membership form. The NRA’s “acceptance of minorities” comes as a surprise to most mainstream media types, but not to the members themselves.
There are historical reasons that the American tradition of gun ownership is strongest among the descendants of the northern Europeans who settled much of America. But an enduring and transcendent benefit of being an American—whether your descendants came to these shores 12 generations ago as mine did or 3 generations ago as my wife’s did—is that the blessings of liberty belong to us all. It’s been a long road since colonial America. But here we all are in the 21st century, living in the greatest nation on earth. And prominent among those blessings is our natural right of self-defense, whether we live in South Central Los Angeles or Beverly Hills.
—Timothy Wheeler, MD is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation.