Gun rights activists need to follow in the footsteps of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, according to musician-turned-conservative pundit Ted Nugent.
“In 2014, gun owners must learn from Rosa Parks and definitely refuse to give up our guns,” Nugent writes, in a column published Thursday by World Net Daily and flagged by Media Matters. “As Rosa Parks once said, ‘You must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.’”
Nugent criticized Connecticut lawmakers for creating what he described as “the invasion of the gun snatchers.” The gun control law signed by Gov. Dannel Malloy last April expanded the list of banned rifles in the state, and required those who already owned the newly-illegal weapons to register them.
While owners registered close to 50,000 of the guns in order to comply with the new law, according to the Hartford Courant, as many as 100,000 owners may be flouting the law by not registering. Nugent compares those gun owners to Parks’ famous 1955 act of civil disobedience.
“Regardless what our gun-snatching Fedzillacrats claim, banning so-called ‘assault weapons’ will not reduce crime rates and will not make you any safer,” he wrote. “What will make you much safer is returning these Fedzillacrats who are drunk on power and control to the unemployment lines this November.”
Gun advocates have challenged the Connecticut law in court, but earlier this year a federal judge upheld the legislation, finding it burdens but does not violate Second Amendment rights.
“The court concludes that the legislation is constitutional. While the act burdens the plaintiffs’ Second Amendment rights, it is substantially related to the important governmental interest of public safety and crime control,” U.S. District Judge Alfred Covello, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, wrote in the decision.
Nugent has a long history of comparing the plight of Second Amendment rights advocates to the civil rights movement, and Parks specifically. In October he called himself “Rosa Parks with a Gibson” and less than a month after the Newtown, Conn. school shooting at Sandy Hook he declared gun owners “the new Rosa Parks.”
He’s not the only Second Amendment advocate who has compared the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to gun rights. Last year, Larry Ward, the organizer behind “Gun Appreciation Day,” argued Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sought a gun permit at one point and said slavery wouldn’t have been able to exist in America if slaves had been able to own guns. When he joined PoliticsNation to discuss the comparison, Rev. Sharpton pointed out that Dr. King changed his mind on gun ownership, saying he was glad he was denied the permit and would never carry a firearm again.
Morgan Whitaker