Did you know that Martin Luther King Jr’s house was bombed in 1956?
Did you know that after the bombing occurred, he applied for a permit to legally own and carry a firearm for his self-protection?
“Most people think King would be the last person to own a gun. Yet in the mid-1950s, as the civil rights movement heated up, King kept firearms for self-protection,” writes author and UCLA Professor of Law Adam Winkler.
RELATED: Policing Comes to a Stop in New York City, People Get Along Peacefully and Society Continues
“In fact, he even applied for a permit to carry a concealed weapon.”
It turns out that police would not approve Martin Luther King’s application for a permit.
Martin Luther King had every justifiable reason to be issued a permit, given that there were unceasing death threats made against him.
Perhaps more than anybody else at the time, Martin Luther King was in need of firearms for basic safety.
Why, then, did the police reject his application?
Professor Winkler remarks:
As I found researching my new book, Gunfight, in 1956, after King’s house was bombed, King applied for a concealed carry permit in Alabama. The local police had discretion to determine who was a suitable person to carry firearms. King, a clergyman whose life was threatened daily, surely met the requirements of the law, but he was rejected nevertheless. At the time, the police used any wiggle room in the law to discriminate against African Americans.
Unsurprisingly, police found Martin Luther King “unsuitable” to own a gun based on the color of his skin.
In fact they denied his application, harassed him, arrested him, and forced him to remain defenseless until the day he was killed.
Even today, police routinely disarm people as part of the US government’s War on Guns. Like the War on Drugs, people of lower income and people of color are disproportionately targeted in the War on Guns.
RELATED: The Day Cops Got Into a Helicopter and Dropped Explosives onto an American Neighborhood, Killing Men, Women, and Children
Many non-violent people have been locked in cages for violations as frivolous as failing to register their firearms.
We will never know whether Martin Luther King could have prevented his assassination if cops had let him own a firearm for protection.
Were it not for the police intentionally disarming him, perhaps he would still be alive and active today.
Watch the video below to find out what Martin Luther King thought the 3 Evils of Society were.
