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The other issue is the "rights to bear arms" has never been a factor in any civil rights dispute in the US, whether it was systematically oppressing black people for generations or one-off riots or strike-breaking in which cops fired on crowds without causing wider conflicts as a consequence.

(arguably the one area in which citizen-owned firearms have actively affected the history of US civil liberty is in carrying out the occasional assassination of people adjudged to have been bit too keen on civil liberties)

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Yep. There's a great article by the Atlantic called The Secret History of Guns. [1] I'll go over a couple of interesting points.

- Martin Luther King Jr. applied for a concealed carry permit after his house was bombed in 1956. After that he had armed supporters stand guard outside his house. King's house was described as "an arsenal."

- The co-founder of the Black Panthers found a law on the books allowing them to open carry in California. Blacks were getting no protection by the police so this was pretty pivotal. The Panthers started arming themselves and had a picnic outside the State's Capital building. After this happened the racist California legislature pushed through a law banning open carry. It was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. Funny enough, he was the first president endorsed by the NRA.

- "After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn’t do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities."

- "In the 1920s and ’30s, the NRA was at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control"

[1] http://theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/09/the-secret-h...

A bit of unmentioned history: the NRA wasn't in the business, so to speak, of endorsing candidates until after the 1977 Cincinnati Revolt (at the annual meeting), so Reagan or Carter were the first Presidents they could possibly endorse. Carter was anti-gun but smart enough not to be visibly, Reagan signed the Gun Owners Protection Act of 1986 reigning in the BATF, without which we very possibly wouldn't have a gun culture today (or perhaps we'd have tested out this thesis of armed resistance and revolt).

ADDED: Every major party Presidential candidate after 1977 has been a gun grabber with the possible exception of Romney (details on request), the NRA's only been able to endorse the least worst, or in 1992 and 1996 endorse neither.

The bit about the "1920s and '30s" is more fair, but if you read the full text and know about all that the NRA didn't support, including the cited inclusion of handguns in the NFA of '34, "forefront" falls short of the mark. And of course per the Cincinnati Revolt that NRA isn't the modern NRA, which nowadays has done a 180 on concealed carry, the gravamen of this article's claim. Major NRA figure Marion Hammer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Hammer) was the leader in establishing Florida's 1987 shall issue law, which opened the floodgates so that today 42 states, soon to be 43 with Illinois, have shall issue regimes.

Circling back to MLK, today he wouldn't have much difficulty getting a concealed carry permit (or set of them) good in most of the nation, including all of the South.

Lots of liberals were famously armed when they went into the South, like Eleanor Roosevelt, many blacks kept themselves alive or less repressed with personal firearms, like Condoleezza Rice's father and his friends, and then there's the Deacons for Defense and Justice: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacons_for_Defense_and_Justice . jivatmanx in the other reply right now covers a bit of what happened prior to and during the Civil War; I hail from the southern edge of what you might call Bleeding Missouri and have studied it a bit, guns were most certainly a very important factor.

As for strike-breaking and all that, while it's not an area I've studied, it's well established that both sides were armed and used their guns.

I'm not saying many liberals, strikers and black people weren't armed and prepared to fight where it favoured them.

I'm saying they were, and people got oppressed in a far more direct, blatant and universal manner than anything that is likely to emerge from PRISM or the present US government's policy goals. Citizen-owned firearms might have been handy in the odd skirmish, but they didn't cause legislators or law enforcement to back down. Black people sat in the back of the bus and grudgingly accepted there wasn't much they could do about their neighbour getting lynched. Strikes were bust in a blaze of gunfire and millions of other members of the trade union movement went to work as normal the next day. Even as determined a revolutionary as John Brown failed where the Union military succeeded a year later.

Concern that the oppressed could potentially gain access to firearms neither dissuaded administrations from enacting oppressive laws nor accelerated the pace of their removal.

Why would it be different next time round?

Strange, I have this memory of the following successes of both groups:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Act (the Wagner Act, even if moderated by things like the Taft–Hartley Act)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-fourth_Amendment_to_the_... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_v._Virginia_Board_of_Ele...

And it's always struck me that the Civil Rights Memorial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Memorial) is most remarkable because it only has 40 names on it.

(Just the highest of highlights, I'm leaving a lot out.)

I am aware the twentieth century happened.

However, I have yet to see anyone seriously suggest that the Civil Rights Act was introduced because the police were terrified that black people defying segregation laws might shoot them, or the Supreme Court ruled segregation in schools unconstitutional because it had proved unenforceable. For that matter, those Southern whites who thought their rights were being violated by "forced busing" proved equally reluctant to resort to armed confrontation. It wasn't a hot war, or even a cold war, it was a culture war.

The right to bear arms was orthogonal to the civil rights movement: it didn't prevent the original introduction of the tyranny off "Jim Crow" laws which were effectively enforced for decades, didn't influence the legislative and judicial rulings against them in the mid 20th century and couldn't even protect the movement's key figures.

Obviously we disagree, I think the RKBA allowed a lot of blacks to continue pushing by allowing them to continue living, or living longer, or limiting the degree to which they could be easily intimidated.

One thing you're not factoring in when you compare this period to the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras is economics and technology. Everyone including blacks were much more able to afford small arms and ammo by the civil rights era, and guns were a lot more maintainable after we switched to non-corrosive primers and smokeless powder. And of course technological advances helped the economics by driving down the intrinsic costs of guns and ammo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_%28abolitionist%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleeding_Kansas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Malcolmxm1carbine3gr.gif

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