The Trace Opts to Highlight Armed Group Claiming to Target Local Cops, ICE

The Trace has never come across a gun control law that the writers there didn’t support. I have yet to see a single piece out of the “newsroom” that wasn’t anti-Second Amendment on some level or another, and that’s not surprising. After all, they’re funded by Michael Bloomberg, who is as anti-gun as they come.

So imagine my surprise when they decided to write about a group in Philadelphia that modeled itself on the old Black Panthers, “cleverly” calling themselves the Black Lions.

Yeah, they really stretched.

As eight men and one woman patrolled the streets of North Philadelphia on a below-freezing night in late January, they proudly modeled themselves on the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, a group founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in California in the 1960s. 

The men were following Paul Birdsong, chairman of the newly formed Black Lion Party for International Solidarity, who clutched an MP5 semiautomatic shotgun to his chest. Two journalists from Paris accompanied the group, drawn by Birdsong’s defiant comments about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at a recent protest in downtown Philadelphia.

That’s right, ladies and gents, an MP5 semiautomatic shotgun. 

I wasn’t aware that H&K has sold any shotgun in the United States in the last 20 years or so, and I’ve never heard of an MP5 shotgun, but The Trace likes to bill themselves as a gun newsroom. Surely they understand the topic they’re covering well enough to actually get the firearms right.

Never mind that the picture they use has an MP5, alright, but it’s clearly not a shotgun.

Anyway, with that distraction out of the way…

Although Birdsong, 39, said he began building the Philadelphia organization in 2024, his fiery words during a January 8 protest brought him and his organization a viral level of visibility in and out of Philadelphia. They say their mission is to protect their neighbors from gun violence, drug dealers, sex traffickers, police, and most recently, ICE agents. 

ICE and its agents are drawing global attention for violent clashes with protesters and undocumented people who have been targeted for arrest. Criticism of both the agents and the Trump administration has grown precipitously since the fatal shootings in Minneapolis in January of mother of three Renee Good and intensive care nurse Alex Pretti. 

Policing the police was a hallmark of the original Panthers, which disbanded in 1982. That legacy continues with Birdsong, who said he is not afraid for his safety when confronting armed law enforcement officers. 

Now, the Second Amendment is, in fact, for everyone. It’s not dependent on someone’s politics, race, religion, sex, or any other characteristic beyond being someone who isn’t expressly prohibited from owning a gun after due process of law, and even then, I disagree with a lot of those people being prohibited.

But while The Trace argues that the group may face blowback, correctly pointing out that California’s Mulford Act was in response to the Black Panthers walking around with guns, and it being lawful, I’m more alarmed that the writer saw that as the issue, rather than how they clearly want to engage law enforcement officers who are, you know, enforcing the law.

I get that not everyone likes how ICE is handling things. If I were more trusting of the media’s reporting on the topic, I might be there with them, but they are enforcing federal law–and laws that have been on the books for decades, I might add–so bringing a gun to a confrontation might not be the best idea.

Especially since it seems clear they’re not just interested in watching.

Meanwhile, despite their own anti-gun focus, there seems to be little to no critique of these knobs carrying guns to tense situations where they know violence might become a strong possibility, whereas it wouldn’t be if they left the guns at home.

The inconsistency bothers me more than anything else. The Trace has worn its bias on its sleeve since day one, which is something I actually kind of respect about them. Sure, the rest of the media acts like they’re just a neutral newsroom, but they don’t really try to pretend they’re any such thing.

Yet here is a group of people who are trying to antagonize law enforcement, may be looking to kill federal agents and local police alike, and their response is basically crickets, beyond trying to help boost the pathetic membership numbers for this group.

So it’s not an issue with guns for them.

It’s an issue of people like us having guns.

Good to know.

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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