Stephanie Mencimer has a stupid bit at Mother Jones (but I repeat myself) on how the second amendment existed to, and I am not making this up, keep the slaves down:

Last week at an American Constitution Society briefing on the Heller case, NAACP Legal Defense Fund president John Payton explained the ugly history behind the gun lobby’s favorite amendment. “That the Second Amendment was the last bulwark against the tyranny of the federal government is false,” he said. Instead, the “well-regulated militias” cited in the Constitution almost certainly referred to state militias that were used to suppress slave insurrections. Payton explained that the founders added the Second Amendment in part to reassure southern states, such as Virginia, that the federal government wouldn’t use its new power to disarm state militias as a backdoor way of abolishing slavery.

They cite the appropriately named Bogus, who we’ve had fun with before on this issue because his alleged research relies primarily on the discredited work of Bellisiles.

See, this is a bit silly because if you look at the actual history of gun control and not the made up version of the second amendment perpetuated here, the first gun control schemes came into being specifically to disarm freed slaves. And these two bits are interesting:

In an interview, Bogus says that polls consistently show that African Americans support gun control in much higher numbers than white people do, and probably for good reason: They’re usually the ones looking at the wrong end of the barrel. As the NAACP points out in its brief on Heller, in D.C. in 2004, there were 137 gun-homicide victims. All but two of them were black. If the Supreme Court invalidates the city’s handgun ban, any ensuing uptick in gun violence is likely to have a disproportionate impact on African Americans, particularly young men.

And who was on the, I guess, right end of the barrel? And this:

Back in 1988, the African American syndicated columnist shot an unarmed, 18-year-old white kid from Chevy Chase who’d gone for an unauthorized dip in Rowan’s swimming pool. Rowan, who shot the kid in the wrist as he tried to flee, claimed he’d feared for his life and was only defending himself. Nonetheless, the columnist was prosecuted for illegally possessing a handgun. The trial ended with a hung jury and Rowan escaped punishment (though the teenagers were sentenced to community service), but the incident fueled a tremendous amount of racial tension in the city that might have been avoided if Rowan had just, say, called the cops.

You mean, strict gun control advocate Carl Rowan? I mean, you could not possibly have picked a better example. Why are anti-gun activists so violent?

Via reader JKB who emails:

Seems, they contend citing the NAACP, that the 2nd Amendment was incorporated in the Bill of Rights to permit Southern slave owners to keep the slaves down. Oddly, to me that would support a desire for a self defense interpretation rather than banning guns as they ague. I suppose they missed the whole abolition of slavery and skip right over the history of gun control as a way to keep guns out of the hands of freed slaves. If it was as they contend a racist effort then what would be a better slap in the face to racists than to use the amendment to allow a black man to arm himself?

They also seem to miss that Pennsylvania and New Hampshire both put forth a right to bear arms right. If my history is remembered correctly, those weren’t states that supported slavery. In fact, I believe they actively worked against it.

Posted in uncategorized on March 21st, 2008 by SayUncle | RSS 2.0 |