RACIST!
HoosierRadical (73 posts)
The Real and Racist Origins of the Second Amendment
Last edited Fri Dec 21, 2012, 01:28 AM USA/ET - Edit history (2)
Why does the US Constitution guarantee a right “to keep and bear arms� Why not the right to vote, the right to a quality education, health care, a clean environment or a job? What was so important in early America about the right of citizens to have guns? And is it even possible to have an honest discussion about gun control without acknowledging the racist origins of the Second Amendment?
The dominant trend among legal scholars, and on the current Supreme Court is that we are bound by the original intent of the Constitution's authors. Here's what the second amendment to the Constitution says: “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.†Clearly its authors aimed to guarantee the right to a gun for every free white man in their new country. What's no longer evident 230 years later, is why. The answer, advanced by historian Edmund Morgan in his classic work, American Slavery, American Freedom, the Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, sheds useful light on the historic and current politics and self-image of our nation.
Colonial America and the early US was a very unequal place. All the good, cleared, level agricultural land with easy access to transport was owned by a very few, very wealthy white men. Many poor whites were brought over as indentured servants, but having completed their periods of forced labor, allowing them to hang around the towns and cities landless and unemployed was dangerous to the social order. So they were given guns and credit, and sent inland to make their own fortunes, encroaching upon the orchards, farms and hunting grounds of Native Americans, who had little or no access to firearms. The law, of course did not penalize white men who robbed, raped or killed Indians. At regular intervals, colonial governors and local US officials would muster the free armed white men as militia, and dispatch them in murderous punitive raids to make the frontier safer for settlers and land speculators.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/american-history-black-history-and-right-bear-arms
Later, it is brought up that most gun control laws were meant to keep blacks disarmed.
To wit a DUmbass replies DUmbassedly:
BainsBane (1,961 posts)
11. Yes, that was in order to prop up slavery
So why do you claim Edmund Morgan's argument is wrong? You don't actually think The founders intended the Second Amendment to apply to blacks? None of the rest of the constitution did.
You've obviously put guns at the center of your understanding rather than thinking about the relationship between slavery and race. There were many ways in which whites maintained supremacy. And the very notion of privileging whiteness emerged in the context of the development of slavery over the 17th century. The law you site about guns was one of many steps in creating slavery in the colonies, and far from the most important. When the first Africans arrived in 1604, they were treated as indentured servants. Over the course of the century, as white servants increasingly demanded land, Virginians gradually created slavery as a racialized institution: they forbade miscegenation, forbid Africans from holding indenture contracts over whites, took away their property rights, and eventually made their servitude permanent. You can see Virginia laws gradually codify slavery, step by step, over the course of the 17th century.
Firearms were part of maintaining control over slaves, and naturally that wasn't going to work if they were armed.
Racial equality never existed as a concept in the 17th century, but race as a distinct marker of status didn't exist until the end of the 17th century. The notion of race as a biological category emerged in the 19th century. Equality itself was never at issue until the American Revolution and what historian Bernard Baylin called the "contagion of liberty" unleashed by the language of the declaration of independence.
You are taking 21st century concepts of racial equality and looking backward in an effort to buttress your love of guns, but in doing so you miss the key historical dynamics of the period.
And then we read:
villager (18,498 posts)
15. Exactly. And the NRA cleverly got people parroting their devised "gun control is racist" line...
...which is hilarious, coming from such an essentially racist, rightwing organization like the NRA.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022044792When has the NRA ever wrote an amicus brief that said, "except blacks" or words to that effect?
DUmbass, I would like you to meet someone:
This is Otis McDonald.
Otis is a hero among the 2A crowd -- the presumably racist 2A crowd.
Otis sued the city of Chicago after he was denied the right to purchase a gun to defend himself from the armed criminals the city of Chicago wantonly neglected to confront.
Otis, it may be noted, is NOT white.
However, what Otis accomplished as part of his challenge was overturn the Slaughter-House rulings by claiming incorporation (No, lurking DUmbasses, not the business kind); i.e. local governments were not allowed to disregard the fundamental liberties enshrined in the BoR.
McDonald is unique among post-Heller gun cases in that it asked the court to overturn the Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873). Slaughter-House determined that the 14th Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause did not apply the Bill of Rights to the actions of states (and by extension, local governments).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald_v._ChicagoThe 1873 ruling is so odious even Lawrence Tribe rejects it.
So the little tyRANTs want us to believe the 2A was established to kill indians, then ignored to disarm slaves but then championed by the NRA for some nefarious, secretive end (I've heard: to facilitate blacks killing each other).
Any rationalization so long as the conclusion is racism. And with the scarlet R duly affixed they can cease dialogue and commence to lecture, then sermonize and hopefully legally excommunicate in the near future.
You would be better off arguing with a Muslim as to why trussing women up in absurd layers of clothing to crappy theology. The little tyrants rationalize everything but are beyond rational discussion.
