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Star Parker, founder and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, or CURE. (AP)
(CNSNews.com) – At a Friday event billed as a Black History Month press conference, Star Parker said African Americans in Congress who support gun control efforts by President Barack Obama and his administration should consider the history of blacks in this country and people around the globe who were oppressed, including being banned from owning firearms.
CNSNews.com asked Parker, who is the founder and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE): “There are a lot of African Americans and people of color in Congress who are backing Obama’s plan for gun control. What would you say to them because today [at this event] it was revealed that there is a direct effect on the African American community with this gun control?”
Parker said: “Well, I'd say they need to revisit their history – black history, black slave history, black Jim Crow history -- and they should visit the histories of other tyrant nations where we had people like Hitler and Stalin and Mao. Every single time there is someone who wants to take away all other rights of the people, the first right they take away is your right to bear arms.”
“I believe that the the Congressional Black community, or the Congressional Black Caucus is absolutely out of step with black America today on this issue,” Parker said.
Speakers at the event in Washington, D.C., defended the Second Amendment and its guarantee that American citizens have the right to own and bear firearms and that the government should not infringe on that right, including Ken Blackwell, chairman of the board of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE) and a board member of the National Rifle Association.
“That right to protect one’s life and liberty is a God-given right,” Blackwell said in a statement. “It is a gift from God, not a grant from government.”
Parker said her organization held the event to allow black leaders “to express our deep concern of efforts currently under way to limit our God-given and constitutional right of self-defense.”
The gun control laws that banned or put restrictions on African Americans from owning firearms in the United States are documented on a timeline from 1640 to 1995 by the National Rifle Association’s Institute of Legislative Action and can be found here.