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Gee whiz, Jason Whitlock! Can you read a book, bro? Read a book, read a book, read a….well, you know the rest.

OK, in all fairness to Whitlock, I’ll concede the brother probably has read a book. Quite a few, in fact. Hundreds, I’d wager, if his skill as a writer is any indication.

And Whitlock is indeed a skilled writer, a superb wordsmith. Read what he wrote after Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher killed first his girlfriend and then himself two weeks ago.

“We’ve come to accept our insanity. We’d prefer to avoid seriously reflecting upon the absurdity of the prevailing notion that the Second Amendment somehow enhances our liberty rather than threatens it.”

Yes, Whitlock was on his anti-Second Amendment, pro-gun control rant, but I have to admit that as rants go, his was one of the better ones.

“How many young people have to die senselessly? How many lives have to be ruined before we realize that the right to bear arms doesn’t protect us from a government equipped with stealth bombers, predator drones, tanks and nuclear weapons?

“Our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead.

“What I believe is if (Belcher) didn’t possess/own a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today….Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it.”

This is great stuff. I don’t agree with one word of it, but it’s still great stuff. So what did Whitlock do after writing it?

Why, the brother just had to TALK about the column, which he wrote as part of his job as a blogger for Foxsports.com.

There’s one thing that can be said for keeping your mouth shut: it’s easier to keep from putting your foot in it that way. In a pod cast hosted by CNN’s Roland Martin soon after his column appeared, Whitlock wasn’t content to put only one foot in his mouth. He tried to cram both of them right on in there.

He hinted that forces that don’t have the black community’s interests at heart were in fact flooding our neighborhoods with drugs and guns. Oh, and Whitlock believes that the National Rifle Association is “the new KKK.”

So it’s only one book I want Whitlock to read, because he really needs to.

It’s called “Negroes With Guns.” Robert Franklin Williams wrote this classic that was first published in 1962.

Williams was, like Martin Luther King Jr., a civil rights activist. Williams rebooted the nascent NAACP chapter in his hometown of Monroe, N.C. in 1955.

Unlike King, Williams wasn’t totally committed to nonviolence. It was fine as a tactic to be used during desegregation demonstrations, Williams said, but when it came to the Klan shooting up the black community, then it was time for blacks to arm up.

So arm up blacks in Monroe he did.  When Whitlock reads it, he’ll come across this on page 57.

“So we started arming ourselves. I wrote to the National Rifle Association in Washington, which encourages veterans to keep in shape to defend their native land, and asked for a charter, which we got.”

Hmm. The NRA giving a charter to a bunch of black folks in Monroe, N.C. Doesn’t sound KKK-ish to me.

And if Whitlock reads Timothy B. Tyson’s biography of Williams called “Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power,” he’ll find Williams saying the following on page 128, part of an exchange Williams had with North Carolina’s attorney general.

“I’m a member of the National Rifle Association.”

Just to recap: ex-Confederates in Tennessee founded the KKK in 1866. Ex-Union officers founded the NRA in 1871.

The KKK has a history of using terrorism and violence against African Americans. The NRA has no such sordid history.

When Williams and the blacks of Monroe, N.C. needed someone to stand with them against Klan violence in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was the NRA that gave them a charter.

Liberal white folks of that era – and liberal black ones too – were only too content to leave Williams and the blacks of Monroe, N.C. to the tender mercies of the KKK.