3. Strain, Christopher Barry. “Civil Rights and ... - Freedom Archives

everywhere a person goes, even inside one's home, and only if an adversary somehow
squanders the advantage of surprise . It can be argued, as many pundits did in the late
1960'x, that guns were more serviceable as rhetorical appendages than as tools of
revolution, or even devices of self-protection . The defensive purpose of any handgun is
to discourage criminal activity. Indeed, in the absence of legal order, the handgun may be
the most immediate means of thwarting criminal activity ; however, in a civilized society,
physical security is a collective responsibility, not an individual one . Protesters did what
they did to gain state protection that would preclude the need for carrying a gun in the
first place . In other words, part of why the civil rights movement took place was to make
"Negroes with guns" obsolete. Every American has the right to live without fear, and
without relying upon firearms for security. As one scholar has noted, civilization is
characterized by "the gradual perfection of respectful procedure for moral violence [i .e .,
self-defenseJ ." It is "the formalizing of moral violence under rule of law ."~ ° The civil
rights movement itself represented a step toward a more civilized United States.
But self-defense had a positive side, too, perhaps best exemplified by the Deacons
for Defense and Justice in 1965-1966 . Self-defense meant something else, apart from its
own practicality or feasibility . It meant showing fight . Self-defense brought about a
radical re-alignment in Afro-American thinking, causing-to borrow Thomas Kuhn's
theory of scientific revolution-a "paradigm shift" in black consciousness. Self-defense
°Robert Ginsberg, `"The Paradoxes of Violence, Moral Violence, and Nonviolena,"
in V.K. Kool, ed., Perspectives on Nonviolence (New York : Springer-Verlag, 1990), 162 .
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