As the national coordinator for the Pink Pistols, the largest U.S. pro-queer gun group that was founded under the principle “Armed queers don’t get bashed,” I found Hogg’s statement not just wrong, but completely careless in its inaccuracy, and therefore callous to the injustice done to those people whom he is claiming to champion.
Hogg speaks of “centuries of gun violence prevention.” I have no idea how he arrived at this number, and I doubt anyone else does, either. If there is a history book that tells the story of how non-white queer women and transwomen started a gun control movement in 1820, then I would very much like to read it.
I specify the year 1820 because Hogg’s use of the plural for
century indicates a minimum of 200 years, and the United States will be only 244 years old this July 4. In the 44-year period between 1776 and 1820, our country was nearly always at war, including the Revolutionary War, the Franco-American Naval War, the Barbary Wars, the War of 1812, and the Creek War. During that time our nation still relied upon militias composed of volunteers with privately owned rifles and pistols. So restricting arms only to those citizens who belonged to a standing army would not only have severely hampered a fledgling America’s struggle for existence both on home soil and abroad, but gun control as we know it today would have been an alien concept to American colonists and early citizens.
At that time, the British East India Company — a private company answerable to stockholders, not an organ of the British government — had the
largest armed force in the world, consisting of multiple armies with cavalry and artillery assets, as well as fleets of heavily armed merchantmen supplemented with warships. Furthermore, the Constitution of the United States includes a framework for Congress to write letters of marque and reprisal, which granted private citizens the ability to hunt ships of hostile nations for the good of the country. These private citizens did this with privately held warships armed with naval-scale cannons.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/0...t-people-did-not-start-the-anti-gun-movement/