The Tony Auth cartoon in today's Philadelphia Inquirer resorts to some of the Inquirer's usual kneejerk assumptions about the NRA.

As a member of the NRA and other often-stereotyped groups, I don't enjoy stereotypes, and I'm no more enamored with the idea that because I belong to the NRA I dream about arming infants, nuns, and cats any more than I enjoy stereotypes about gays being immoral, Jews being greedy, or blacks being stupid.

(However, I have to admit that I find myself tempted to ask why Mr. Auth didn't include any "happily married gay couples with closets full of assault weapons" in his cartoon.)

In addition to invoking the usual stereotypes about gun owners, the cartoon's caption quotes the famous words of Martin Luther King Jr. This invokes the conventional wisdom that King was a Ghandian pacifist who would never have had guns.

That King never owned guns is considered so beyond dispute that we all just take it as a given, right?

Not so fast.

Well before his decision (apparently in 1955) to embrace Ghandian non-violence as the best tactic in the national showdown over civil rights, King had been a committed civil rights activist, but also a man who believed in protecting himself and his family against constant threats of racist violence (which included the bombing of his home).

Accordingly, the pre-Ghandian King had been armed to protect himself and his family -- to the point where his home was described by one activist as "an arsenal":

King would later admit that at the start of the boycott be was not firmly committed to Gandhian principles. He had initially advocated nonviolence not as a way of life but as a practical necessity for a racial minority. When his home was bombed at the end of January, he had cited Jesus-- "He who lives by the sword whill perish by the sword"-- rather than Gandhi in urging angry black neighbors to remain nonviolent. At the time of the bombing, King was seeking a gun permit, and he was protected by armed bodyguards. Only after the bombing did King alter his views on the use of weapons for protection. His reconsideration was encouraged by the arrival in Montgomery of two pacifists who were far more aware than he of Gandhian principles.

Competing with each other for the influence over King, Bayard Rustin, a black activist affiliated with the War Resisters League, and Glenn E. Smiley, a white staff member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, saw themselves as King's tutors on Gandhian precepts. Rustin was shocked to discover a gun in King's house, while Smiley informed fellow pacifists that King's home was "an arsenal."

Martin King was not committed to nonviolence at the beginning of the bus protest. As white violence became increasingly focused on King personally through police harassment, the bombing of his home, volumes of hate mail, and frequent telephone threats of harm, King, seeking to protect himself and his family from white violence, applied for a gun permit, which, of course, was rejected. The threat of violence was so real that armed blacks took turns guarding King's home. King also kept a loaded gun in his house, which Bayard Rustin of the War Resistance League nearly sat on during a visit.

For starters, why was the application rejected? The use of the language "of course" makes clear the unmistakable reason -- white racism by a bigoted Southern police department (King lived in Montgomery, Alabama at the time), and brings to mind the specter of the racist history of gun control -- all amply documented by Clayton Cramer in his ground-breaking work. The racist gun legislation was not merely intended to disarm former slaves after the Civil War. It also directly targeted those involved in the emergence of the 20th Century Civil Rights movement:

Most of the American handgun ownership restrictions adopted between 1901 and 1934 followed on the heels of highly publicized incidents involving the incipient black civil rights movement, foreign-born radicals or labor agitators. In 1934, Hawaii, and in 1930 Oregon, passed gun control statutes in response to labor organizing efforts in the Port of Honolulu and the Oregon lumber mills. Michigan's version of the Sullivan law was enacted in the aftermath of the trial of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black civil rights leader. Dr. Sweet, had moved into an all white neighborhood and had been indicted for murder for shooting one of a white mob that had attacked his house while Detroit police looked on. A Missouri permit law was enacted in the aftermath of a highly publicized St. Louis race riot.[47]

After World War I, a generation of young blacks, often led by veterans familiar with firearms and willing to fight for the equal treatment that they had received in other lands, began to assert their civil rights. In reaction, the Klan again became a major force in the South in the 1910's and 1920's. Often public authorities stood by while murders, beatings and lynchings were openly perpetrated upon helpless black citizens. And once again, firearms legislation in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee and Texas made sure that the victims of the Klan's violence were unarmed and did not possess the ability to defend themselves, while at the same time cloaking the specially deputized Klansmen in the safety of their monopoly of arms.

Needless to say, the denial of King's gun permit application did not make it into the Wiki entry on King. (Should someone add a sentence with the appropriate links?)

Personally, I think King missed an opportunity to strike a blow for civil rights. So did his supporters, and so did the Second Amendment-shirking ACLU. Bearing in mind that King's house had been bombed, and he had received numerous death threats, I think it is beyond debate to any fair-minded person that the denial of his gun permit application was grounded in racial discrimination, which was illegal even at the time. He would have had a good case. But it was one of those "missed" opportunities -- and I place the word "missed" in quotes because of the strategic nature of King's decision to ditch his guns, and embrace Ghandianism.

What I'd like to know (both as an NRA member and history buff) is whatever happened to his gun? The man was monitored and bugged; is it possible that somewhere along the line one of the various surveillance operatives might have noted and recorded the serial numbers of his gun? In those days, gun ownership was pretty much uncontrolled everywhere, and guns could be purchased by mail order and even sent to minors (so purchase records of the sort kept today would be nonexistent). I don't know whether in 1955 Alabama still had any laws barring black citizens from merely owning guns, but I'm assuming that King's ownership of the gun must have been legal. Otherwise he'd have doubtless been arrested on gun possession charges by the racist cops who already hated and watched him. (Indeed, the bigots at the time would have probably savored such an opportunity.)

So, King's gun permit application must have been for a permit to carry the gun. What I don't know is whether the permit process was governed by state law or municipal (Montgomery) law, and whether or not applications would have been gun-specific and included serial numbers. If so, the serial number(s) might be matters of public record somewhere, and maybe the gun or guns could be found and placed in a museum where they "of course" belong.

If I were feeling up to the task, I'd almost be inclined to do a retaliatory photoshop of the Auth cartoon, with an alternate history image of King celebrating his newly won victory for the Second Amendment rights of black people in the South, captioned along the lines of

"I HAVE A GUN!"

But alas! If I did that I'd probably be accused of "copyright infringement."