Lest you have any doubts about how cynically Michael Bloomberg views individual autonomy, consider his comments at the Aspen Institute, where he explicitly called for disarming a specific demographic–minority males between the ages of 15 and 25.

Bloomberg claimed that 95 percent of murders fall into a specific category: male, minority and between the ages of 15 and 25. Cities need to get guns out of this group’s hands and keep them alive, he said.

“These kids think they’re going to get killed anyway because all their friends are getting killed,” Bloomberg said. “They just don’t have any long-term focus or anything. It’s a joke to have a gun. It’s a joke to pull a trigger.”

Who exactly are “these kids” and “they”? Did Bloomberg just lump together tens of millions of people as a bunch of mindless dolts?The racial implications of his comment are appalling.

Hizzoner should be reminded that gun control laws in America began as Southern states completely disarmed blacks, leaving them vulnerable to the ravages of the KKK. Read Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion in McDonald v. Chicago.

Forget about the Constitution, or self defense of person or property. Bloomberg knows better. In any event, under federal law, it is illegal to buy a gun under the age of 21, so most of the demographic is already covered.

Bloomberg apparently thinks minority males between the ages of 21 and 25 can’t be trusted with a gun. Or large sodas. Or tobacco. Or trans fats. Or styrofoam. Or noisy earbuds. You get the picture. “If Michael Bloomberg did not exist, libertarians would have to invent him.”

For those of you who may agree with Hizzoner on guns, he tied the same demographic–young minority males–to “Stop and Frisk.”

At one point, the former mayor brought up New York City’s stop-and-frisk practices, which gained national attention in 2011. Bloomberg said that during his last year in office, a minister at a Baptist church in Harlem invited him to speak.

“While I’m sitting there waiting for him to introduce me, he said to his congregation, ‘You know, if every one of you stopped and frisked your kid before they went out at night, the mayor wouldn’t have to do it,’” Bloomberg said. “And so I knew I was going to be okay with that audience.”

On this topic, a recent revelation from the papers of Rosa Parks is instructive:

When Rosa Parks was a little girl in rural Alabama, she would stay up at night, keeping watch with her grandfather as he stood guard with a shotgun against marauding members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Klansmen often terrorized black communities in the early 1900s, and Parks’s grandfather, Sylvester Edwards, the son of a white plantation owner, had their house boarded up for protection.

But Parks longed for a showdown.

“I wanted to see him kill a Ku-Kluxer,” the renowned civil rights leader wrote in a brief biographical sketch years later. “He declared that the first to invade our home would surely die.”

…

Another intriguing fragment is the brief, undated biographical sketch, written on a few pages torn from a notebook.

In it, she tells of the Klan menace in her rural community of Pine Level, Ala.

“KKK moved through the country, burning negro churches, schools, flogging and killing,” she wrote.

Her grandfather, who was tall, thin and “very caucasian in appearance,” had long, white hair that she loved to comb.

“He would stay up to wait for [the Klansmen] to come to our house,” she wrote. “He kept his shotgun within hand reach at all times. . . . The doors and windows were boarded and nailed tight from the inside. I stayed awake nights keeping vigil with grandpa.”