01/13/2021
Earlier: Gun Controllers And Black Crime: The Zebra Killings And Handgun Control, Inc.
F. Roger Devlin has an article called The Zebra Killings,American Renaissance, January 8, 2020, about some well known (at the time) interracial murders in the '70s. The editor’s note says "This 9,000-word account is the best summary you will find anywhere of a largely forgotten series of grisly black-on-white murders." and it starts with this:
They will never be as celebrated as Emmett Till, but 15 white San Franciscans were killed because of their race over a terrifying six-month period in the early 1970s. The killings, which became known as the Zebra murders, were carried out by a group of at least four black men associated with the Nation of Islam.
One of the victims was named Shields:
Two days later, 23-year-old Nelson Shields was helping a friend pick up a rug in the city’s Ingleside neighborhood around 9:30 PM. As he arranged the contents of his station wagon to make room for the rug, three shots struck him from behind. Nelson Shields was the fifteenth “Zebra” fatality. Once again, investigators found the usual .32 shell casings and heard the usual vague descriptions of black men running from the scene.
The horror and fear provoked by serial murders such as Zebra is cumulative, and it was now reaching a crisis. The day after the Shields murder, Mayor Joseph Alioto met with SFPD leaders and made clear to them he no longer cared about constitutional niceties. In effect, he ordered them to do whatever it took to stop the killers. The next day, April 18, the SFPD announced “extreme measures.”
I mentioned this earlier when I read a 30 year old review by Gregg Easterbrook in The Washington Monthly [November 1981] of Guns Don’t Die, People Do by Pete Shields.
In terms of ignorance and hate of guns and gun owners, the review is something of a classic, and the book, by a founder of Handgun Control, Inc (now the Brady Campaign) is worse. Most of it is water under the bridge — gun rights have been winning over the gun controllers for years.
However, here’s what inspired Pete Shields to take on America’s gun owners and their Constitutional rights. Easterbrook writes
Pete Shields, a former Du Pont chemical company executive whose son was shot to death in a random street killing, [Emphasis added] has put all the relevant handgun statistics into this important new book.
Googling "Pete Shields" and "son" brought me the result I expected: The New York Times obituary for Nelson T. "Pete" Shields 3d said that
his son, Nelson 4th, was shot and killed in San Francisco in 1975, a victim in a series of racially motivated killings of whites[Emphasis added] by four blacks that came to be known as the Zebra killings. [Nelson Shields 3d, 69, Gun-Control Advocate, January 27, 1993]
I repeat, that bit about the identity and motivation of Nelson 4th’s killers was in The New York Times.(You can read more about the Zebra Killings here, and more about the murder of Nelson 4th here.)
In spite of this, Easterbrook’s article is full of rage against "gun nuts", the National Rifle Association, and American gun manufacturers … all of whom are implicitly white.
Suppose Pete Shields had, after his son’s murder, decided to found something like American Renaissance, or the Council of Conservative Citizens. Would he or his book have gotten a nice review in the Washington Monthly?
It seems like when a black commits a horrible crime, based specifically on black anti-racist ideology, we are all supposed to find ways to fight backlash against blacks … and find new ways of disarming white people.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.