MORE ON THE DEACONS FOR DEFENSE. OK, now I have some time to talk more about the excellent Showtime made-for-TV-movie I saw this past week (showing again this Thursday at 11 PM!). The Deacons for Defense were a black paramilitary organization founded in 1964 in Bogalusa, LA. Here are FBI records on the group. According to the movie and accompanying documentary (insert obligatory disclaimer about not getting one’s history lessons from Showtime), DFD was founded because the town had been virtually taken over by the Ku Klux Klan; police officers were Klan members, the Klan was untouchable, and black people were being attacked with impunity. So the black community armed. The spectacle of black men with rifles finally forced the town to comply with federal rulings, fire the Klan cops, and integrate the town’s main employer and its public spaces.

The documentary said that DFD had been overlooked–both at the time of its activity, and since then–because it did not adhere to the nonviolent strategies championed by Martin Luther King, Jr. King stayed away from Bogalusa because he did not want to become involved in a violent resistance movement and did not want the civil rights movement associated with defensive violence. So even men who had been members of the DFD were often reluctant to admit their involvement years later.

Second Amendment fans will, of course, love the movie. It presents one of the basic gun-rights scenarios: The police won’t protect you. The first gun I ever saw was in a friend’s map compartment. It shocked me; I couldn’t help but look confused and a bit frightened. She explained that she had already been assaulted twice. She had no confidence that the police would be interested in investigating any crimes against a lesbian living in a rough neighborhood. She had decided that her safety was worth more than D.C. law. That encounter didn’t change my mind about gun control (that happened later), but it did make a strong impression. I didn’t think I could tell her she was wrong.

But her situation is not quite the core gun-rights situation, since a gun-controller could certainly reply that the problem here is the unresponsive police. The solution, then, would be to convince the police to do their job. (Good luck.) But the question of what to do when the cops won’t help you does illuminate the key question posed by today’s gun-rights movement: What do you do when the cops can’t help you, because they’re not there? Don’t you and yours deserve protection even when cops are miles away?

But for a closer analogy to the DFD situation, we have to move overseas. Dave Kopel has written several articles detailing the disastrous cases in which disarmament (often sponsored by the United Nations) has enabled genocide against the disarmed population.

Kopel’s pieces should shed some light on the various sketchy What to Do About the Kurds proposals. Turkey wants the Kurds to be disarmed at the end of Gulf War: The Second Story. This seems to me like an excellent proposal for disaster. People only disarm when a) they’re convinced that a trusted authority will ensure their safety (as happened in the case of the Deacons for Defense; and, with tragic results, in the cases Kopel cites), or b) they’re defeated in a war. I strongly doubt the Kurds will fall for a).