HERE’S MORE ON CONDI RICE and the right to bear arms:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, recalling how her father took up arms to defend fellow blacks from racist whites in the segregated South, said Wednesday the constitutional right of Americans to own guns is as important as their rights to free speech and religion.

In an interview on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Rice said she came to that view from personal experience. She said her father, a black minister, and his friends armed themselves to defend the black community in Birmingham, Ala., against the White Knight Riders in 1962 and 1963. She said if local authorities had had lists of registered weapons, she did not think her father and other blacks would have been able to defend themselves.

Now that she’s Secretary of State, she has an opportunity to press for treating the right to arms as an international human right. Sure, most governments don’t recognize it now, and are shocked at the suggestion. But that’s true with all newly-recognized rights:

After all, the human rights community has long argued that all sorts of dramatic changes in international law are justified if they might make genocide unlikely and has been nothing less than flexible in discovering such “post-first-generation” human rights as “developmental rights,” “environmental rights” and a “right to peace.”

Surely a right to defend oneself against massacre — particularly when, once again, the international community has failed miserably to prevent genocide in Darfur — is as plausible as those others.

UPDATE: Countertop Chronicles notes that the transcript is up, and this stuff isn’t in it. Poking around, I found this story from the L.A. Times, which says that the interview “was taped for airing Wednesday night.” So maybe they cut it out of the broadcast part?

ANOTHER UPDATE: Yep, that’s what happened. Thanks to reader Joe Zwers, here’s a link to the full interview transcript.