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This past Friday my organization, CURE, sponsored a press conference at the  National Press Club in Washington to bring attention to the importance of  rigorously defending the right of all Americans, guaranteed under the Second  Amendment of our Constitution, to own a gun.

Our event provided a forum for black leaders from the world of politics and  public policy in Washington, from the business community, from academia and from  the clergy to express their deep concern about efforts currently under way to  limit our God-given and constitutional individual right of self-defense.

Because, as conservative black Americans, we know that the soul of America is  kept alive with the free flow of the oxygen of freedom.  And we know that when  that flow is interrupted in any way, the group that suffers first and most are  blacks.

New gun-control initiatives coming from our president and from Democrats in  Congress to respond to a highly publicized tragedy by wanting to expand the  power of government and limit the freedom of citizens comes as no surprise.

There is no problem facing America today that liberals do not believe should  be solved by more government and less freedom.  And liberals are consistent and  predictable in their indifference to facts and experience that show whenever  they do succeed in growing government and limiting freedom, they make matters  worse, not better.

A substantial body of research already shows that gun controls empower  criminals and weaken law-abiding citizens.

As John Lott, former chief economist of the U.S. Sentencing Commission,  recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “With just a single exception, the  attack in Tucson last year, every public shooting in the U.S. in which three or  more people have been killed since at least 1950 have occurred in a place where  people are not allowed to carry their own firearms.”

Regarding black reality, blacks are the least armed, least protected and  defended, and the most assaulted citizens in our country.

According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 42 percent of whites and 16  percent of blacks say that they have a pistol or rifle at home.

And, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, for the period 1980 to  2008, “Blacks were six times more likely than whites to be homicide victims and  eight times more likely to commit a homicide.”

Law-abiding black citizens live under siege in crime-ridden urban centers.   Somehow they are supposed to buy the logic that giving more power to those in  law enforcement already charged with maintaining order but don’t, while  stripping down the freedoms of those that do obey the law, will make them better  off?

In a Pew Research Center survey in 2009, 46 percent of whites compared to 24  percent of blacks said they have a “great deal” of confidence in the local  police to enforce the law.

Can anyone whom God has blessed with a brain actually think that universal  background checks will keep guns out of the hands of gang thugs?  Or that these  same checks, in which some past legal infraction might nullify a gun  application, will not result in even fewer urban law-abiding blacks obtaining a  weapon for protection?

Perhaps even worse than another make-pretend big-government “answer” that  will not only not solve a problem, but will make it worse, gun-control  initiatives mask over the issues that really need attention: a culture that  devalues personal responsibility, that fosters government dependence, that  trashes traditional understanding of sex, marriage and family and that bans  these traditional values from our public schools and our public life.

Americans of all backgrounds must fight yet another misguided liberal attempt  to undermine our personal freedom and sap the vitality of our nation.