Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Truth is often stranger than fiction these days, with actual news hard to differentiate from parody sites like the Babylon Bee. In fact, I had to double check to make sure I wasn’t at the Bee when I ran across this headline from Denver’s alt-weekly West Word earlier today:
As utterly bananas as the headline is, the story itself is even more bizarre:
Rao would like to see the Second Amendment dismantled nationwide, starting in Colorado. That night, she dreamed up the idea for Here4TheKids, which calls for women of color to use the power of white women to achieve that goal.
“White women have the most power in the country, and they have the most privilege. They can actually effect change,” says Rao.
She and her co-founders envision a large group of white women under the leadership of women of color, using their political clout to force governors across the country to sign executive orders banning guns.
And Here4TheKids is taking aim first at Colorado, a state where guns are the leading cause of death for children and teens, and at Governor Jared Polis — whose voting base is made up largely of white women, Rao notes. Tens of thousands of white women have signed up to participate in a sit-in at the Colorado Capitol that will start at 5 a.m. June 5, she says; Rao expects that number to grow over the next few weeks.
Yep, Rao’s hoping a horde of “white women putting their bodies on the line” will show up at the state capitol in Denver and sit there until Gov. Polis signs an executive order banning all gun sales in the state and authorizing a mandatory “buy back”. While she says tens of thousands of women have signed up to take part, I’m guessing that the actual numbers will be far lower, though she’s already recruited a few die-hards willing to poop their pants if it leads to a ban.
“I’m planning on wearing a diaper,” says Wolf Terry, one of the white women who will be at the Capitol on June 5.
A freelance writer living in Lakewood, Terry says she only recently learned of Rao, when a friend messaged her suggesting she check out the Here4TheKids movement. Terry responded to a post from Rao on social media calling for volunteers; five minutes later, she says, she got a call back.
Something tells me that if the response was really as overwhelming as Rao claims it is, it would have taken longer than five minutes to get back to Terry, but whatever. Let’s say the protests are as large as Rao is hoping for, and that Polis is so overwhelmed by the large number of white progressive women who turned out that he frantically signs an executive order giving them everything they want so they’ll go away. What happens next? A lawsuit would be filed and the first judge to get ahold of the case would throw out that executive order as unconstitutional. Rao may say she’s trying to repeal the Second Amendment, but in reality she’s hoping to convince Democrat governors to simply ignore it instead.
“This is civil disobedience,” Rao says. “This is a sit-in. This is a rising up of the people we have never seen in America in our lifetime.”
And it’s just the start. “It’s literally history,” she continues. “This is going to be probably the biggest thing that will have happened in any of our lifetimes. This is going to be a ‘Where were you on June 5?’ And I hope all you white folks are able to say, ‘I was in Denver.'”
Rao bizarrely compares her effort to the civil rights activists who marched from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965, though those marching were doing so in order to secure their civil liberties. Rao and her co-horts, on the other hand, are hoping to use the collective power of white women to curtail the exercise of a constitutionally-protected right; coincidentally (I’m sure) at a time when more racial minorities are embracing their Second Amendment rights. Though she’ll never acknowledge this uncomfortable fact, she and her anti-gun allies are standing on the wrong side of history here. I know it would upend her view of the Second Amendment, but I wish she’d pick up a copy of Charles Cobb’s This Nonviolent Stuff Will Get You Killed or Nicholas Johnson’s Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms to learn how the Second Amendment helped civil rights activists protect themselves and each other during their quest for equality.
Of course, that’s about as likely to happen as Jared Polis signing an executive order banning gun sales and ordering a compensated confiscation of legally-owned firearms. I’m sure there’ll be a protest at the Colorado capitol on June 5th, but I doubt it will even be the biggest event in Denver that weekend (the Rockies play the Giants at home on June 6th). Pants might be changed over the course of the sit-in (depending on how many attendees are wearing diapers), but I don’t think they’ll be changing history… or many minds, for that matter.