The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

1
Gun control disproportionately impacts the poor and minorities and puts them at greater risk of prosecution. So why is it that progressives, who like to think of themselves as champions of the “people,” are always pushing for stricter gun-control laws?
Handguns at a gun store in Uniondale, N.Y., in 2013. © Shannon Stapleton/Reuters Handguns at a gun store in Uniondale, N.Y., in 2013.

In January 2016, New York mayor Bill de Blasio created “Project Fast Track” to aggressively pursue all firearms cases in New York. Defendants in that court are overwhelmingly young black males who are charged with simply possessing an illegal firearm — not using it or committing any violent crime. The majority in these cases have never been convicted of a felony.

It’s a local snapshot of a broader picture. Nationally, while black Americans amount to only 13 percent of the population, they receive 51 percent of all felony firearm-possession convictions. A number of these cases may in fact be connected to more nefarious criminal activity. And given the crime wave sweeping U.S. cities, prosecutors should be pursuing violent crimes wherever they can.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/the-r ... ar-AAMdLWD


FINALLY, there a little bit of a trickle in the mainstream press about this sort of stuff. Letters of support on this to the news organization perhaps?

I don't love the "conservative" slant, but I can get behind the message 100%

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

3
lurker wrote: Sat Jul 17, 2021 7:57 am contrarily, a similar argument can be made that the RKBA enunciated in the 2nd amendment is also based in a desire to keep POC in their place. and there's plenty of racism there if you are willing to see it, even more so if you want to see it. it's not all about redcoats and their evil designs to tax without representation.
I have never seen any evidence that was a reason for the implementation of the 2nd amendment apart from Anti propaganda.

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

4
Defendants in that court are overwhelmingly young black males who are charged with simply possessing an illegal firearm — not using it or committing any violent crime. The majority in these cases have never been convicted of a felony.
Much like our drug laws that make felons out of young minorities and when they get out of jail, the only jobs they can find are in criminal enterprises because who will hire a felon. One estimate is that 30% of US adults have a criminal record.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2 ... al-record/

Alcohol prohibition had racist and anti-immigrant roots.
"It largely had to do with a xenophobic, largely anti-immigration feeling that arose in the American Middle West, that arose among white, native-born Protestants. It also had a strong racist element to it. Prohibition was a tool that the white South could use to keep down the black population. In fact, they used Prohibition to keep liquor away from black people but not from white people. So you could find a number of ways that people could come into whatever issue they wanted to use and use Prohibition as their tool. The clearest one, probably, was women's suffrage. Oddly, the suffrage movement and the Prohibition movement were almost one and the same — and you found organizations like the Ku Klux Klan supporting women's suffrage because they believed women would vote on behalf of Prohibition."
https://www.npr.org/2011/06/10/13707759 ... d-politics

It's not hard to believe that gun prohibition also has some racist elements.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

6
I do not know if this has been posted here before but...


It had an effect on me.

A much different opinion is what is getting talked up by progressives now though like Carol Anderson.
The language of the amendment, Anderson says, was crafted to ensure that slave owners could quickly crush any rebellion or resistance from those whom they'd enslaved. And she says the right to bear arms, presumably guaranteed to all citizens, has been repeatedly denied to Black people.

Repeal The Second Amendment? That's Not So Simple. Here's What It Would Take
"One of the things that I argue throughout this book is that it is just being Black that is the threat. And so when you mix that being Black as the threat with bearing arms, it's an exponential fear," she says. "This isn't an anti-gun or a pro-gun book. This is a book about African Americans' rights."
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/10021076 ... -amendment

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

8
I don't subscribe to the anti-gun linking of slavery and the 2nd Amendment. Many northern states didn't have slaves but they still had guns - they hunted for food and there were still threats like wildlife, criminals, Native Americans... but very rarely black Americans. People who support this theory have agendas. These agendas already support beliefs by anti-gunners, they don't look for evidence.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

10
highdesert wrote: Mon Jul 19, 2021 2:13 pm I don't subscribe to the anti-gun linking of slavery and the 2nd Amendment. Many northern states didn't have slaves but they still had guns - they hunted for food and there were still threats like wildlife, criminals, Native Americans... but very rarely black Americans. People who support this theory have agendas. These agendas already support beliefs by anti-gunners, they don't look for evidence.
I am going to pick up the book referenced and read it. I don't want to jump to conclusions...

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

11
Slavery was the primary reason for the 2nd Amendment; read Federalist 46. From day one, the South was worried the North would invade the South to put an end to slavery. This is why the South insisted on the 2nd Amendment.
The other scenario was... If the North voted to disarm the South, how can they defend themselves from slaves?

There are many other reasons for the 2nd Amendment, but remember...It wasn't the North who demanded it, it was the South.
“I think there’s a right-wing conspiracy to promote the idea of a left-wing conspiracy”

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

12
There's a long history of elites restricting the bearing of arms by the peasantry, long before firearms and continuing to present. Some interesting examples when you compare English common law to restrictions in occupied Ireland, or Scotland after Culloden.

I'm not saying that slavery wasn't used as a line of support for the 2nd in the South - different states and cultures had different justifications. Remember, the Bill of Rights wasn't incorporated until the 14th was passed, and did not constrain state legislatures. After all, the most aggressively pro-gun state in the period was Vermont - well known for its racial diversity, support of slavery, and pivotal role in secession. [/s]

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

13
highdesert wrote: Mon Jul 19, 2021 2:13 pm I don't subscribe to the anti-gun linking of slavery and the 2nd Amendment. Many northern states didn't have slaves but they still had guns - they hunted for food and there were still threats like wildlife, criminals, Native Americans... but very rarely black Americans. People who support this theory have agendas. These agendas already support beliefs by anti-gunners, they don't look for evidence.
I agree. There were more universal reasons for the 2nd, the idea of self defense, the ability to provide for food, and the possible need of collective defense. That doesn’t exclude the agenda others may have had. In totality the intent of the second is clear, it is not subjugation even thought the government practiced it against the first arrivals and the southern entities against slaves. The present gun control agenda is clearly against those with the least to protect and preserve the advantage of the elites. The second did not get adopted just because of the south, some northern states saw fit to put it into their state constitutions. I think that speaks volumes.
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Image

"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!" Loquacious of many. Texas Chapter Chief Cat Herder.

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

14
The book came up on the "Project 1619" thread.
viewtopic.php?f=40&t=61938&p=839645&hil ... on#p839645

This was a review of Carol Anderson's book I posted from The National Review.
If the right to bear arms was intended to preserve slavery, why did civil-rights leaders insist that black Americans should be armed to protect themselves?

Left-wing academic Carol Anderson’s new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, is all over the news. “The Second Amendment is not about guns — it’s about anti-Blackness, a new book argues,” reads a CNN headline. NPR claims that the author has uncovered the racist “roots” of the Second Amendment.

This is wishful thinking. The Second is an attempt — much like the 1619 Project — to reimagine history in purely racial terms. The result is tendentious polemic that suffers not only from a paucity of historical evidence, but from a dishonest rendering of the facts we do know.

After comprehensively detailing the constitutional debate over slavery and the nefariousness of that institution, Anderson takes the liberty of asserting that the Second Amendment was “not some hallowed ground but rather a bribe, paid again with Black bodies.” This is a contention that isn’t backed by a single contemporaneous quote or piece of hard evidence in the book.

Indeed, Anderson ignores the tradition of militias in English common law — codifying the “ancient and indubitable” right in the 1689 English Bill of Rights — which had nothing to do with chattel slavery. Anderson ignores the fact that nearly every intellectual, political, and military leader of the Founding generation — many of whom had no connection to slavery — stressed the importance of self-defense in entirely different contexts.

It was slavery skeptic John Adams, in his 1770 defense of Captain Thomas Preston, one of the soldiers responsible for the Boston Massacre, who argued that even British soldiers had an inherent right to defend themselves from mobs. “Here every private person is authorized to arm himself, and on the strength of this authority, I do not deny the inhabitants had a right to arm themselves,” he noted. When Pennsylvania became the first colony to explicitly guarantee the right to bear arms, it was Benjamin Franklin, by then an abolitionist, who presided over the conference.

It was the anti-slavery Samuel Adams who proposed that the Constitution never be used to “authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.” In the writings and speeches of nearly all American Founders, the threat of disarmament was a casus belli.

In making her case that the Second Amendment was predominantly an invention of the South, Anderson stresses that most American jurisdictions did not even have their own Second Amendment before the constitutional convention. She’s right. Many anti-Federalists believed that enshrining these rights on paper would lead to future abuses. Of course, Southerners didn’t need permission to suppress black slave revolts, anyway. They had done so on numerous occasions before the nation’s founding.

Yet, by 1791, of the four jurisdictions that had written their own Second Amendments, three of them — Vermont, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania — had already abolished slavery. When Vermont authored its first constitution in 1777, in fact, it protected the right to keep and bear arms in the same document that it banned slavery.

But to make the claim that the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution to placate slave owners, Anderson is impelled to take numerous shortcuts. Take, for example, this pivotal sentence in the book:

“In short, James Madison, the Virginian, knew ‘that the militia’s prime function in his state, and throughout the south, was slave control.’”

The author frames the quote as if Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, had said it himself — or, if we’re being generous, that it’s a fair representation of his views. When you follow the book’s endnote, however, it leads to a 1998 paper titled “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment,” written by anti-gun activist Carl T. Bogus, who shares Anderson’s thesis. It is his quote. Nowhere does Bogus offer any sample of Madison declaring, or even implying, that slave control was the impetus for the Second Amendment.

In another instance, again relying on Bogus’s paper, Anderson declares that among his “great rights,” Madison discusses only “trial by jury, freedom of the press, and ‘liberty of conscience,’” and that the right to bear arms does not even “make the list.” This, too, is extraordinarily misleading, as the quote comes from a Madison speech proposing the Bill of Rights in June 1789. Early in his argument, Madison mentions, in passing, some of the “great rights,” before literally listing — “fourthly,” in fact, right after freedom of religion and assembly — the “right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

As I read The Second, I kept thinking how easily it could be reedited to make a compelling book about the immorality of stripping Americans of their rights. After all, gun control was inextricably tied to racism in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1834, the State of Tennessee revised its constitution from “That the freemen of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence” to “That the free white men of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence.” A number of Southern states followed suit.

Which is one of the reasons that Michigan senator Jacob Howard, when introducing the 14th Amendment ensuring that the constitutional rights of blacks in the South were protected, specifically pointed to “the personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments to the Constitution,” as in the freedom of speech and of the press and “the right to bear arms” (italics mine).

Civil-rights leaders of the 19th and early 20th centuries also lamented that the right to self-defense was denied them. Fredrick Douglass reacted to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 by editorializing that the best remedy would be “a good revolver, a steady hand, and a determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap.”
The late-19th-century civil-rights leader Ida B. Wells argued that one of the lessons of the post–Civil War era, “which every Afro American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” T. Thomas Fortune, another black civil-rights activist of the era, argued that it was with a Winchester that the black man could “defend his home and children and wife.”

Now, it should be noted that even if the Second Amendment had been specifically written, as Anderson maintains, under pressure from states in the South that wished to preserve the subjugation of humans, the nation’s sin would have been denying the inalienable right of self-defense to all people. We don’t attack the idea of free speech simply because people are denied its protections. That fact only accentuates its importance.

For most of our history, self-defense was also seen as an immutable right that existed with or without the sanction of the state. “Remember that the musket — the United States musket with its bayonet of steel — is better than all mere parchment guarantees of liberty,” is how Douglass made the case for natural rights. He did it better than many of the Founders. Certainly, he did it better than Anderson.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/ ... amendment/
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

15
highdesert wrote: Mon Jul 19, 2021 8:57 pm The book came up on the "Project 1619" thread.
viewtopic.php?f=40&t=61938&p=839645&hil ... on#p839645

This was a review of Carol Anderson's book I posted from The National Review.
If the right to bear arms was intended to preserve slavery, why did civil-rights leaders insist that black Americans should be armed to protect themselves?

Left-wing academic Carol Anderson’s new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, is all over the news. “The Second Amendment is not about guns — it’s about anti-Blackness, a new book argues,” reads a CNN headline. NPR claims that the author has uncovered the racist “roots” of the Second Amendment.

This is wishful thinking. The Second is an attempt — much like the 1619 Project — to reimagine history in purely racial terms. The result is tendentious polemic that suffers not only from a paucity of historical evidence, but from a dishonest rendering of the facts we do know.

After comprehensively detailing the constitutional debate over slavery and the nefariousness of that institution, Anderson takes the liberty of asserting that the Second Amendment was “not some hallowed ground but rather a bribe, paid again with Black bodies.” This is a contention that isn’t backed by a single contemporaneous quote or piece of hard evidence in the book.

Indeed, Anderson ignores the tradition of militias in English common law — codifying the “ancient and indubitable” right in the 1689 English Bill of Rights — which had nothing to do with chattel slavery. Anderson ignores the fact that nearly every intellectual, political, and military leader of the Founding generation — many of whom had no connection to slavery — stressed the importance of self-defense in entirely different contexts.

It was slavery skeptic John Adams, in his 1770 defense of Captain Thomas Preston, one of the soldiers responsible for the Boston Massacre, who argued that even British soldiers had an inherent right to defend themselves from mobs. “Here every private person is authorized to arm himself, and on the strength of this authority, I do not deny the inhabitants had a right to arm themselves,” he noted. When Pennsylvania became the first colony to explicitly guarantee the right to bear arms, it was Benjamin Franklin, by then an abolitionist, who presided over the conference.

It was the anti-slavery Samuel Adams who proposed that the Constitution never be used to “authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.” In the writings and speeches of nearly all American Founders, the threat of disarmament was a casus belli.

In making her case that the Second Amendment was predominantly an invention of the South, Anderson stresses that most American jurisdictions did not even have their own Second Amendment before the constitutional convention. She’s right. Many anti-Federalists believed that enshrining these rights on paper would lead to future abuses. Of course, Southerners didn’t need permission to suppress black slave revolts, anyway. They had done so on numerous occasions before the nation’s founding.

Yet, by 1791, of the four jurisdictions that had written their own Second Amendments, three of them — Vermont, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania — had already abolished slavery. When Vermont authored its first constitution in 1777, in fact, it protected the right to keep and bear arms in the same document that it banned slavery.

But to make the claim that the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution to placate slave owners, Anderson is impelled to take numerous shortcuts. Take, for example, this pivotal sentence in the book:

“In short, James Madison, the Virginian, knew ‘that the militia’s prime function in his state, and throughout the south, was slave control.’”

The author frames the quote as if Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, had said it himself — or, if we’re being generous, that it’s a fair representation of his views. When you follow the book’s endnote, however, it leads to a 1998 paper titled “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment,” written by anti-gun activist Carl T. Bogus, who shares Anderson’s thesis. It is his quote. Nowhere does Bogus offer any sample of Madison declaring, or even implying, that slave control was the impetus for the Second Amendment.

In another instance, again relying on Bogus’s paper, Anderson declares that among his “great rights,” Madison discusses only “trial by jury, freedom of the press, and ‘liberty of conscience,’” and that the right to bear arms does not even “make the list.” This, too, is extraordinarily misleading, as the quote comes from a Madison speech proposing the Bill of Rights in June 1789. Early in his argument, Madison mentions, in passing, some of the “great rights,” before literally listing — “fourthly,” in fact, right after freedom of religion and assembly — the “right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

As I read The Second, I kept thinking how easily it could be reedited to make a compelling book about the immorality of stripping Americans of their rights. After all, gun control was inextricably tied to racism in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1834, the State of Tennessee revised its constitution from “That the freemen of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence” to “That the free white men of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence.” A number of Southern states followed suit.

Which is one of the reasons that Michigan senator Jacob Howard, when introducing the 14th Amendment ensuring that the constitutional rights of blacks in the South were protected, specifically pointed to “the personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments to the Constitution,” as in the freedom of speech and of the press and “the right to bear arms” (italics mine).

Civil-rights leaders of the 19th and early 20th centuries also lamented that the right to self-defense was denied them. Fredrick Douglass reacted to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 by editorializing that the best remedy would be “a good revolver, a steady hand, and a determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap.”
The late-19th-century civil-rights leader Ida B. Wells argued that one of the lessons of the post–Civil War era, “which every Afro American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” T. Thomas Fortune, another black civil-rights activist of the era, argued that it was with a Winchester that the black man could “defend his home and children and wife.”

Now, it should be noted that even if the Second Amendment had been specifically written, as Anderson maintains, under pressure from states in the South that wished to preserve the subjugation of humans, the nation’s sin would have been denying the inalienable right of self-defense to all people. We don’t attack the idea of free speech simply because people are denied its protections. That fact only accentuates its importance.

For most of our history, self-defense was also seen as an immutable right that existed with or without the sanction of the state. “Remember that the musket — the United States musket with its bayonet of steel — is better than all mere parchment guarantees of liberty,” is how Douglass made the case for natural rights. He did it better than many of the Founders. Certainly, he did it better than Anderson.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/ ... amendment/
:clap2: :clap2: :clap2: This. This. This.
Image
Image

"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!" Loquacious of many. Texas Chapter Chief Cat Herder.

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

16
FrontSight wrote: Mon Jul 19, 2021 4:17 pm Slavery was the primary reason for the 2nd Amendment; read Federalist 46. From day one, the South was worried the North would invade the South to put an end to slavery. This is why the South insisted on the 2nd Amendment.
The other scenario was... If the North voted to disarm the South, how can they defend themselves from slaves?

There are many other reasons for the 2nd Amendment, but remember...It wasn't the North who demanded it, it was the South.
I just read Federalist 46 at your behest, and I'm not getting the takeaway from it that slavery was the primary reason for the 2nd amendment from it in any way, shape, or form.

In fact, I'm seeing no mention of slavery at all in there. Could you clarify your assertion? I'm genuinely asking.

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

17
I read the Federalist 46 paper just now as well. It says nothing about slavery and the second. I suspect as noted earlier, later agenda driven individuals have in their own work tried to frame their thoughts as Madison’s. On the whole Madison frames the need for the people to be armed to resist a potential misuse of military power by those controlling a standing army. It’s more of a warning against the military industrial complex.
Image
Image

"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!" Loquacious of many. Texas Chapter Chief Cat Herder.

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

18
sikacz wrote: Tue Jul 20, 2021 7:56 am I read the Federalist 46 paper just now as well. It says nothing about slavery and the second. I suspect as noted earlier, later agenda driven individuals have in their own work tried to frame their thoughts as Madison’s. On the whole Madison frames the need for the people to be armed to resist a potential misuse of military power by those controlling a standing army. It’s more of a warning against the military industrial complex.

I too reread #46 and nothing about slavery. Federalist Paper #29 written by Hamilton is another one touted but nothing there either. Madison and Hamilton supported militias, but were suspicious of a national army.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

19
sikacz wrote: Mon Jul 19, 2021 9:04 pm
highdesert wrote: Mon Jul 19, 2021 8:57 pm The book came up on the "Project 1619" thread.
viewtopic.php?f=40&t=61938&p=839645&hil ... on#p839645

This was a review of Carol Anderson's book I posted from The National Review.
If the right to bear arms was intended to preserve slavery, why did civil-rights leaders insist that black Americans should be armed to protect themselves?

Left-wing academic Carol Anderson’s new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, is all over the news. “The Second Amendment is not about guns — it’s about anti-Blackness, a new book argues,” reads a CNN headline. NPR claims that the author has uncovered the racist “roots” of the Second Amendment.

This is wishful thinking. The Second is an attempt — much like the 1619 Project — to reimagine history in purely racial terms. The result is tendentious polemic that suffers not only from a paucity of historical evidence, but from a dishonest rendering of the facts we do know.

After comprehensively detailing the constitutional debate over slavery and the nefariousness of that institution, Anderson takes the liberty of asserting that the Second Amendment was “not some hallowed ground but rather a bribe, paid again with Black bodies.” This is a contention that isn’t backed by a single contemporaneous quote or piece of hard evidence in the book.

Indeed, Anderson ignores the tradition of militias in English common law — codifying the “ancient and indubitable” right in the 1689 English Bill of Rights — which had nothing to do with chattel slavery. Anderson ignores the fact that nearly every intellectual, political, and military leader of the Founding generation — many of whom had no connection to slavery — stressed the importance of self-defense in entirely different contexts.

It was slavery skeptic John Adams, in his 1770 defense of Captain Thomas Preston, one of the soldiers responsible for the Boston Massacre, who argued that even British soldiers had an inherent right to defend themselves from mobs. “Here every private person is authorized to arm himself, and on the strength of this authority, I do not deny the inhabitants had a right to arm themselves,” he noted. When Pennsylvania became the first colony to explicitly guarantee the right to bear arms, it was Benjamin Franklin, by then an abolitionist, who presided over the conference.

It was the anti-slavery Samuel Adams who proposed that the Constitution never be used to “authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.” In the writings and speeches of nearly all American Founders, the threat of disarmament was a casus belli.

In making her case that the Second Amendment was predominantly an invention of the South, Anderson stresses that most American jurisdictions did not even have their own Second Amendment before the constitutional convention. She’s right. Many anti-Federalists believed that enshrining these rights on paper would lead to future abuses. Of course, Southerners didn’t need permission to suppress black slave revolts, anyway. They had done so on numerous occasions before the nation’s founding.

Yet, by 1791, of the four jurisdictions that had written their own Second Amendments, three of them — Vermont, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania — had already abolished slavery. When Vermont authored its first constitution in 1777, in fact, it protected the right to keep and bear arms in the same document that it banned slavery.

But to make the claim that the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution to placate slave owners, Anderson is impelled to take numerous shortcuts. Take, for example, this pivotal sentence in the book:

“In short, James Madison, the Virginian, knew ‘that the militia’s prime function in his state, and throughout the south, was slave control.’”

The author frames the quote as if Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, had said it himself — or, if we’re being generous, that it’s a fair representation of his views. When you follow the book’s endnote, however, it leads to a 1998 paper titled “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment,” written by anti-gun activist Carl T. Bogus, who shares Anderson’s thesis. It is his quote. Nowhere does Bogus offer any sample of Madison declaring, or even implying, that slave control was the impetus for the Second Amendment.

In another instance, again relying on Bogus’s paper, Anderson declares that among his “great rights,” Madison discusses only “trial by jury, freedom of the press, and ‘liberty of conscience,’” and that the right to bear arms does not even “make the list.” This, too, is extraordinarily misleading, as the quote comes from a Madison speech proposing the Bill of Rights in June 1789. Early in his argument, Madison mentions, in passing, some of the “great rights,” before literally listing — “fourthly,” in fact, right after freedom of religion and assembly — the “right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.”

As I read The Second, I kept thinking how easily it could be reedited to make a compelling book about the immorality of stripping Americans of their rights. After all, gun control was inextricably tied to racism in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1834, the State of Tennessee revised its constitution from “That the freemen of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence” to “That the free white men of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence.” A number of Southern states followed suit.

Which is one of the reasons that Michigan senator Jacob Howard, when introducing the 14th Amendment ensuring that the constitutional rights of blacks in the South were protected, specifically pointed to “the personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments to the Constitution,” as in the freedom of speech and of the press and “the right to bear arms” (italics mine).

Civil-rights leaders of the 19th and early 20th centuries also lamented that the right to self-defense was denied them. Fredrick Douglass reacted to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 by editorializing that the best remedy would be “a good revolver, a steady hand, and a determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap.”
The late-19th-century civil-rights leader Ida B. Wells argued that one of the lessons of the post–Civil War era, “which every Afro American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” T. Thomas Fortune, another black civil-rights activist of the era, argued that it was with a Winchester that the black man could “defend his home and children and wife.”

Now, it should be noted that even if the Second Amendment had been specifically written, as Anderson maintains, under pressure from states in the South that wished to preserve the subjugation of humans, the nation’s sin would have been denying the inalienable right of self-defense to all people. We don’t attack the idea of free speech simply because people are denied its protections. That fact only accentuates its importance.

For most of our history, self-defense was also seen as an immutable right that existed with or without the sanction of the state. “Remember that the musket — the United States musket with its bayonet of steel — is better than all mere parchment guarantees of liberty,” is how Douglass made the case for natural rights. He did it better than many of the Founders. Certainly, he did it better than Anderson.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/ ... amendment/
:clap2: :clap2: :clap2: This. This. This.


I just skimmed through “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment,” written by anti-gun activist Carl T. Bogus...

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm ... id=1465114

And while his premise states that Madison "drafted the second amendment to assure his constituents in Virginia and the south generally, that congress could not use its newly-acquired powers to indirectly undermine the slave system by disarming the militia", I don't see a single quote attributed to Madison in his paper which supports that argument. Perhaps those making that argument would like to try to find one?

I do see a lot of known Anti-propaganda groups cited throughout this paper though. Leading me to believe that it's less than honest in it's approach, as I already know for fact that these Anti groups have an agenda and only publish things that support their arguments.

I'm willing to hear this argument out, but I'm not seeing anything other than smoke and mirrors so far.

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

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highdesert wrote: Tue Jul 20, 2021 9:09 am
sikacz wrote: Tue Jul 20, 2021 7:56 am I read the Federalist 46 paper just now as well. It says nothing about slavery and the second. I suspect as noted earlier, later agenda driven individuals have in their own work tried to frame their thoughts as Madison’s. On the whole Madison frames the need for the people to be armed to resist a potential misuse of military power by those controlling a standing army. It’s more of a warning against the military industrial complex.

I too reread #46 and nothing about slavery. Federalist Paper #29 written by Hamilton is another one touted but nothing there either. Madison and Hamilton supported militias, but were suspicious of a national army.
It seems like they, the anti proponents, are projecting.
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"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated!" Loquacious of many. Texas Chapter Chief Cat Herder.

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

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highdesert wrote: Tue Jul 20, 2021 9:09 am
sikacz wrote: Tue Jul 20, 2021 7:56 am I read the Federalist 46 paper just now as well. It says nothing about slavery and the second. I suspect as noted earlier, later agenda driven individuals have in their own work tried to frame their thoughts as Madison’s. On the whole Madison frames the need for the people to be armed to resist a potential misuse of military power by those controlling a standing army. It’s more of a warning against the military industrial complex.

I too reread #46 and nothing about slavery. Federalist Paper #29 written by Hamilton is another one touted but nothing there either. Madison and Hamilton supported militias, but were suspicious of a national army.
The false claim about Federalist 46 is a common refrain within the disarmament lobby in their efforts to frame the 2A constraint on government's ability to infringe on the RKBA as inherently racist. They've been banking on no one actually reading the document. The real problem for 2A supporters today is this is one of the avenues of attack that has taken root and become a permanent fixture among disarmament enthusiasts in a larger effort to identify firearm ownership with racism. Thus, truth has become irrelevant, taking a back seat to the irresistible temptation to shame prospective firearm purchasers.

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

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DispositionMatrix wrote: Tue Jul 20, 2021 9:46 am
highdesert wrote: Tue Jul 20, 2021 9:09 am
sikacz wrote: Tue Jul 20, 2021 7:56 am I read the Federalist 46 paper just now as well. It says nothing about slavery and the second. I suspect as noted earlier, later agenda driven individuals have in their own work tried to frame their thoughts as Madison’s. On the whole Madison frames the need for the people to be armed to resist a potential misuse of military power by those controlling a standing army. It’s more of a warning against the military industrial complex.

I too reread #46 and nothing about slavery. Federalist Paper #29 written by Hamilton is another one touted but nothing there either. Madison and Hamilton supported militias, but were suspicious of a national army.
The false claim about Federalist 46 is a common refrain within the disarmament lobby in their efforts to frame the 2A constraint on government's ability to infringe on the RKBA as inherently racist. They've been banking on no one actually reading the document. The real problem for 2A supporters today is this is one of the avenues of attack that has taken root and become a permanent fixture among disarmament enthusiasts in a larger effort to identify firearm ownership with racism. Thus, truth has become irrelevant, taking a back seat to the irresistible temptation to shame prospective firearm purchasers.
That's what gets me the most, when someone declares something racist, homophobic, anti-ethnic... then it's automatically accepted as the truth without evidence and it becomes no longer acceptable to discuss it. Not surprising it's a tactic in the anti-gunners book of deceptions.
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts." - Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Re: The Racist Reality of Gun Control from MSN!

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NegativeApproach wrote: Tue Jul 20, 2021 6:24 am
FrontSight wrote: Mon Jul 19, 2021 4:17 pm Slavery was the primary reason for the 2nd Amendment; read Federalist 46. From day one, the South was worried the North would invade the South to put an end to slavery. This is why the South insisted on the 2nd Amendment.
The other scenario was... If the North voted to disarm the South, how can they defend themselves from slaves?

There are many other reasons for the 2nd Amendment, but remember...It wasn't the North who demanded it, it was the South.
I just read Federalist 46 at your behest, and I'm not getting the takeaway from it that slavery was the primary reason for the 2nd amendment from it in any way, shape, or form.

In fact, I'm seeing no mention of slavery at all in there. Could you clarify your assertion? I'm genuinely asking.
Why else would the north march on the South at that time in history?

"Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops."

What are they talking about here, and more importantly; why?
“I think there’s a right-wing conspiracy to promote the idea of a left-wing conspiracy”

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