[This is adapted from an address by James Fulford to the First VDARE.com Webinar on January 19 2013. We hope to make recordings available shortly. For information when available, email office@vdare.com with “Webinar recording” in subject line]

12 years ago, shortly after 9/11, I wrote a piece called Reconquista, Terrorism, and Gun Control [October 17, 2001]

Peter Brimelow protested at the time that this wasn’t an immigration column, it was a gun control column. VDARE.com’s focus has always been on immigration.

However, immigration includes

• Terrorist immigration
• Criminal immigration
• Illegal immigration

And what gun control is about is preventing you from defending yourself when the government that can’t or won’t defend you.

“Can’t defend you” means obviously that the police can’t be there all the time—the saying is that “when seconds count, the police are just minutes away.”

“Won’t defend you” is something different. It refers to the fact that you may need help and the government will refuse to come. Some examples:

• In the LA Rodney King riots, the LAPD backed away. When the rioting started, police in police cars were told by radio to leave the area. They didn’t come back until much later. Korean store owners were forced to use rifles to defend themselves, because there were no police in sight.
• The Puerto Rican Day Wildings in New York in 2000, where 57 women were sexually assaulted as police refused to make arrests.
• The August 2011 London Riots, where, as the Daily Mail put it, shopkeepers were “mystified at tactics that left them defenceless.”
• Hurricane Katrina: the federal government held back, and the black New Orleans PD deserted and took part in the looting.
• Crown Heights Riot—blacks terrorized Jews in Crown Heights for days without police interference.

The Crown Heights Riot is a special case—it has also been described as a pogrom. The parallel with the Russian pogroms of the 19^th century is that black mayor of New York, David Dinkins, was permitting the riots by failing to order the police to stop them. The suspicion is that Dinkins may have sympathized with the anti-Semitic black rioters.

But in most cases, the authorities are simply being cowardly, as a result of many, many, complaints from the Left about “excessive force” used in fighting riots. Police chiefs and police forces who fight rioters get punished for “excessive force,” but none of them are ever punished for insufficient force. And of course, since rioters are members of a minority group, using force would be racist.

The biggest place the U.S. government has backed away from protecting the American public: America’s southern border. There are no troops on the border, and when the National Guard was deployed there, they were deployed with unloaded guns.

Ranchers there cry out to the Federal Government for protection, but get none.  They all have guns available at all times.

When the ranchers stop illegals crossing their land, arrest them and call the police, they get charged.

The Minuteman Movement’s tactics were based on the principle of guarding the border, but not engaging the illegals directly, only observing and reporting. Nevertheless, they all carried guns. Without guns, their mission would have been suicidal, since the illegals are frequently dangerous criminals, and travel in large groups.

The rifle of choice for Americans engaged in duties like patrolling the border is the semi-automatic AR-15. Old school gun experts are still, after 50 years, unhappy with the .223 cartridge. But the cartridge works most of the time, the gun always works, and it’s the rifle millions of American veterans are trained in using.

It’s the latest target of a ban, because it was used in a recent crime at Newtown. The question is always “Why would anyone need that many bullets?”

The answer is there are a lot of rioters in a mob, whether the old style of lynch mob or the newer style of race riot, and illegals, when marching across the border, come in groups of mob size. A Georgia woman (white) recently emptied her six-shot gun into an attacker (black), and didn’t  kill him. (But he did desist).[M.D. Harmon: Tale of two terrorized women shows value of being armed, Portland Press-Herald, January 11, 2013]

In terms of the immigration debate, the gun laws are part of a group of laws that only apply to Americans.

• Do you pay taxes? Illegals don’t, they get paid  under the table.
• Do you pay health insurance? Illegals don’t, they go to the emergency room anyhow.
• Do you have car insurance? Illegals drive without it.
• Will they lose their license as a result? No, they don’t have licenses.

Activists keep preventing police from locking up unlicensed illegals, and also from impounding cars.

All those laws don’t, de facto, apply to illegals.

And living in an underground society, where everything is illegal, they have few qualms about having unlicensed guns. This is true of even ordinary Hispanic working men, whose actual crimes may only involve wife beating, drunk driving, and smoking marijuana. And it’s much more true of the huge Hispanic criminal gangs.

They all have illegal guns, and illegal drugs, and they shoot both each other and regular Americans all the time.

Inner-city blacks are in the same position—there are no legal gun stores where they are, and they can’t get licenses. They have a lot of guns anyway. That’s how come a 7-year old in Queens recently brought a gun to school.

And efforts to stop them having illegal guns have been condemned as racist. See the ACLU’s recent success in attacking police Stop and Frisk operations in New York.

Of course, the fact that inner city blacks do have access to guns is also condemned as racist. The NAACP did a lawsuit in the late 90’s against the gun manufacturers   for manufacturing and marketing guns.

But attempts to control crime are always considered racist—and those African-American leaders who oppose guns because of the temptation they represent to blacks also oppose any attempts at crime control.

Obama’s proposal to put cops in schools rather than letting teachers who already have permits carry them at work has  gotten complaints from African-American leaders who don’t want young blacks arrested when they commit crimes in schools. See Obama anti-gun project spurs protest from African Americans by Neil Munro, The Daily Caller, January 11, 2013

The Amsterdam News is a famous black newspaper in New York which has applauded Governor Cuomo's recent pointless assaults on legal gun ownership in New York State. [New York leads on tough gun laws, By Herb Boyd, January 17, 2013] But it has spent years opposing stop and frisk in New York. See all 677 results of the following Google search: site:www.amsterdamnews.com Stop and Frisk.

So the Amsterdam News doesn’t want to control the guns used by black criminals in New York—which would save a lot of black lives. They do want to control the guns owned by white people for self-defense...which may also save a lot of black lives, at the expense of white victims.

And that’s why gun control is a matter of life or death.

• The police can’t stop or disarm criminals, and their attempts to do so are racist.
• Murderers don’t get the death penalty—because the death penalty is racist.
• The government won’t send in the troops or a riot squad to stop a riot, because that would be racist.

You may be the only person you can rely on in a murderous attack. And to survive, you must have a gun.

And when you survive the attack, it will turn out—as happened to George Zimmerman, Bernard Goetz, and innumerable police officers—you’ll be a racist too, in the eyes of the media.

But you’ll be alive, and your attacker will be dead.

James Fulford [email him] is a writer and editor for VDARE.com