The truth is quite different from what Loesch would have us believe, as noted by Tom Hartman for Alternet.

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says “State” instead of “Country” (the Framers knew the difference – see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia’s vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too. In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the “slave patrols,” and they were regulated by the states. In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings. ... It’s the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, “Why don’t they just rise up and kill the whites?” If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.

As we all know, the militias proved critical during the American Revolution, being a body of persons who were called on to fight against the British for our nation’s ultimate independence. But that wasn’t their original function during the century prior to that confrontation.

They were also used by President George Washington to put down the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791, which arose after Congress voted to raise taxes to pay for the cost of the Revolutionary Army.

But prior to those achievements in their origin, these vaunted “militias” that are referenced in the Second Amendment (and which are so revered by Scalia and Loesch) were in fact the method used to “protect the people” from the potential uprising of humans which they held in bondage for financial gain. The Second Amendment was written to appease the slave-holding states during the initial formation of the nation after its rebellion against England. It allowed those states to maintain the framework that preserved their oppression and financial rewards.

By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings. As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.

Again, Second Amendment advocates ignore this ugly past and argue that it’s instead primarily a method to protect the nation from the failure of its leaders to preserve the rights of the people. They argue that the Second Amendment is the ultimate defense against “Tyranny” as outlined by James Madison in the essay Federalist No. 46.

On the other hand, should an unwarrantable measure of the federal government be unpopular in particular States, which would seldom fail to be the case, or even a warrant ≈able measure be so, which may sometimes be the case, the means of opposition to it are powerful and at hand. The disquietude of the people; their repugnance and, perhaps, refusal to co-operate with the officers of the Union; the frowns of the executive magistracy of the State; the embarrassments created by legislative devices, which would often be added on such occasions, would oppose, in any State, difficulties not to be despised; would form, in a large State, very serious impediments; and where the sentiments of several adjoining States happened to be in unison, would present obstructions which the federal government would hardly be willing to encounter. ... Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made. 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. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.

Ultimately, this was not mere speculation on his part. This concept here became exactly the rationalization and justification for the Civil War—and it was inspired directly by the fear and perception of the federal government “encroachment” upon the “right” of slavery. This was stated quite explicitly in the articles of secession submitted by several states upon the electoral victory of the first Republican President Abraham Lincoln, whose platform included planks for the abolition of slavery.

Mississipi Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.

This fact is no mere remnant of the past. Many modern police forces which formed during the revolutionary period are also structured in their own origin from the same perspective and in the same mode as these slave patrols. Examples include the Baltimore and Ferguson police departments.

“The Africans did not take kindly to being enslaved, and so they rebelled against the slave holding republic,” he explained. “And that helped to create a culture that has yet to be interrogated or even questioned, even by historians, that basically set forth that people of color, Africans in the first place, African men not least, were the enemies of the republic.” “That’s one of the reasons why oftentimes in cafeterias in school rooms you’ll see unease by school administrators if black youth are sitting together in the same place, as if they’re planning to overthrow the school system. So until we begin to investigate and interrogate that particular conundrum that I’ve just laid out, we’re always going to have more Freddie Grays.” According to Horne, “the origins of urban police department lies precisely in the era of slavery.” “That is to say, slave patrols, which were designated to interrogate, to investigate the enslaved Africans who were out and about without any kind of investigation,” he noted. “If you fast-forward to 2015, you still see more than remnants of that particular system. It’s still rather questionable to some if they see a black person, particularly a black male walking in a certain neighborhood, and therefore they will be asked to produce identification.”

Loesch and her ilk would like to portray the Second Amendment as “race neutral” in the manner that it is written, but that view ignores the real-life context of the time in which it was written. It was a time when the concept of an armed black man or woman would be immediately seen as a clear and present danger to the larger populace, whether they themselves were slave owners or not. Through the implementation of the slave patrols, nearly all southern white men and people were periodically drafted in to the implementation and protection of the slave trade.

The means of maintaining economic dominance and oppression did not die with the end of the Civil War. Instead, it continued on through a century of lynching and terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan as well as Jim Crow and segregation, which were entrenched in both federal and state law and implemented both by local police and private armed citizens.

And it continued through the implementation of the prison industrial complex due to the loophole in the 13th Amendment, which continues to allow for slavery and indentured servitude “for the duly convicted,” as expertly pointed out by Ava Duvernay’s brilliant Netflix documentary 13th.

Even for those who were not incarcerated and dragged back into the slave system that was supposed to have been abolished, there was also the system of red-lining. Red-lining corralled black and immigrant Americans in impoverished neighborhoods where schools and public services were starved of resources and attention, and the possibility of escape into the larger “white world” was limited. Yet that was challenged by returning World War II soldiers of color who had access to the GI Bill. Still, through lending and housing policies as well as building strategic walls, the white populace was able to maintain their “safety” by keeping the slave descendant Africans out and apart.

Gradually, these returning GIs (which included the Tuskegee Airmen) organized and battled back by forming and joining groups such as the NAACP, which was originally a Republican organization. They helped usher in the civil rights movement of the late ‘50s and ‘60s, which were marked by police brutality, murder, and riots. The latter-day slave patrols existed to put down the rebellion of uppity blacks who dared to wander outside their designated areas and request “freedom.”

It should be little surprise that decades of these discriminatory practices (which are worse today in our schools and in housing than they were during the pre-civil rights era) have contributed to a massive wealth and poverty gap among black and white Americans.

It’s a gap that has been maintained thanks to discriminatory laws, greed, indifference, and firepower.

The oppressive forces answered these uprisings and rebellions with the muzzle of a water cannon, butt of a club, bite of a dog, and barrel of a gun, killing the Freedom Riders, Medgar Evers, and Dr. Martin Luther King. This eventually led to a more militant response by some in the black community. They also answered back with the stroke of a pen when the Black Panther Party for Self Protection attempted to exercise their Second Amendment rights, which were supposed to be theirs all along. But we saw clearly how well that was tolerated.

In retaliation for their marching into the state Capitol with shotguns on their shoulders, then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act, which banned the display of weapons in open spaces. At the time, this law was supported by the NRA.

On Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. He shot the president with an Italian military surplus rifle purchased from a NRA mail-order advertisement. NRA Executive Vice-President Franklin Orth agreed at a congressional hearing that mail-order sales should be banned stating, “We do think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.” The NRA also supported California’s Mulford Act of 1967, which had banned carrying loaded weapons in public in response to the Black Panther Party’s impromptu march on the State Capitol to protest gun control legislation on May 2, 1967. The summer riots of 1967 and assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 prompted Congress to reenact a version of the FDR-era gun control laws as the Gun Control Act of 1968. The act updated the law to include minimum age and serial number requirements, and extended the gun ban to include the mentally ill and drug addicts. In addition, it restricted the shipping of guns across state lines to collectors and federally licensed dealers and certain types of bullets could only be purchased with a show of ID. The NRA, however, blocked the most stringent part of the legislation, which mandated a national registry of all guns and a license for all gun carriers. In an interview in American Rifleman, Franklin Orth stated that despite portions of the law appearing “unduly restrictive, the measure as a whole appears to be one that the sportsmen of America can live with.” A shift in the NRA’s platform occurred when in 1971 the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, during a house raid, shot and paralyzed longtime NRA member Kenyon Ballew suspected of stockpiling illegal weapons. The NRA swiftly condemned the federal government. As Winkler points out, following the incident NRA board member and editor of New Hampshire’s Manchester Union Leader William Loeb referred to the federal agents as “Treasury Gestapo”; the association soon appropriated the language of the Panthers insisting that the Second Amendment protected individual gun rights.

The efforts of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and local police under the COINTELPRO project using illegal surveillance, secret informants, and false flag operators eventually killed or imprisoned many of the Panther leadership, even though some of them were completely innocent. Apparently an armed militia of black men whose primary aim was their own self-protection from gangs, drugs, and racist police simply could not be tolerated.

And it still isn’t tolerated.

The argument this is all just a remnant of the past, that bringing all it all up now is just racial grievance politics, is unfortunately belied by the fact that gun-toting mobs of white people fairly went out fairly recently and happily gunned down black people. It happened in 2006 during Hurricane Katrina, as one neighborhood of white people tried to “protect” themselves from what they thought were looters. But those looters were in fact their black neighbors.

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Just try and imagine a neighborhood of black people anywhere doing the same thing to protect themselves using guns, and indiscriminately firing at anyone they don’t recognize without violent reprisal from police, FBI, ATF, and Homeland Security.

The idea of a black man (or even a boy) being inherently dangerous, a threat to the public order constantly on the edge of violent rebellion, or a looter, or a gangster, or a thug is still deeply ingrained in this nation—and we know why: slavery, followed by a century and counting of Jim Crow, segregation, and discrimination leading to the dreaded fear of black retaliation. In truth, most black people would be perfectly happy if all that would finally just stop, without being worried about “getting back” at anyone.

We saw this with Trayvon Martin, who was chased down in the rain by an armed man after he ran away, then grabbed and ultimately shot and killed when he fought back and finally managed to break away. We saw this when 12 year-old Tamir Rice was shot down by Cleveland Police while he held a toy pistol within two seconds after officers arrived, even when the 911 caller said that it was probably a toy.

We saw it with Jonathon Crawford when police responded to a bogus call about an “active shooter” at a Walmart and shot him down because he was holding an unloaded toy gun, which he had picked up from a store shelf.

We saw it when Florida A&M football player Jonathan Ferrel attempted to ask for help after a car crash only to have the home owner call the police claiming an attempted burglary. When the police arrived they shot and killed Ferrel on the spot as he tried to escape while crawling. He had no weapon, and he was no threat.

In neither of these cases was the person who made the false reports to police charged.

We also saw it in the killing of Renisha McBride, who was also looking for help after a car accident—only to be shot in the face.

And did we see the NRA loudly complain when concealed carry licensee Philando Castile was killed by police, just like they previously complained when longtime NRA member Kenyon Bellew was killed in a house raid by the ATF in 1971? Nope. Not so much.

Valerie Castile, the mother of Philando Castile, slammed National Rifle Association chief Wayne LaPierre for staying silent over the death of her son after he told a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday, “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” “If he really cared about the good guys out here, he would have stood up for my son,” Valerie Castile told the New York Daily News. “It’s about money. This country is run off money. Everybody wants a piece.” “My son was one of the good guys, but him being black, obviously they didn’t see him as a good guy,” she said. “They’ve yet to say anything about my son.”

Analysis by John Roman of various shooting cases indicates that white shooters are deemed “justified” when the victim is black by a margin of over 200 percent, and that increases to over 350 percent in states that have “stand your ground” laws in place.

There are racial disparities throughout the criminal justice system. From stop and frisk, to motor vehicle searches at traffic stops, to sentencing and the application of the death penalty, African Americans disproportionately are contacted by the criminal justice system in myriad ways. Notably,finding a racial disparity is not synonymous with finding racial animus. African Americans are more likely to live in dense, impoverished places, and poverty and segregation are clearly linked to criminal incidence and prevalence. Distinguishing racial animus within racial disparities is exceedingly difficult with existing datasets that do not include such key measures as setting and context. However, it is possible to compare the rates of racial disparity across points of criminal justice system contact.Such an effort could help highlight comparatively disproportionate laws and procedures. Racial Disparity in “Justified” Shootings This paper finds substantial evidence of racial disparities in justifiable homicide determinations. Regardless of how the data are analyzed, substantial racial disparities exist in the outcomes of cross-race homicides. These findings hold throughout the analysis, from differences in average rates, to bivariate tests of association, to regression analysis. In addition, the recent expansion of Stand Your Ground laws in two dozen states appears to worsen the disparity.

I used to consider this cartoon from Bowling for Columbine to be a bit over the top. Not anymore.

There may be some quibble with some of the timing of the claims made in this cartoon, but the basic point remains valid.

For centuries now the Second Amendment has been the spine and backbone on which white supremacy has been supported. Whether it’s by police or by private citizens, it’s hard to deny that the practical implementation was originally and continues to serve the cause of racial oppression and violence.

It’s not exactly a coincidence that spree gun killers like Dylan Roof, James Van Brunn, Wade Michael Page, Nikolas Cruz, or others like James Alex Fields Jr., Jeremy Christian, and Sean Urbanski were all neo-Nazi white supremacists, or that murders by those of that ilk doubled in 2017.

Still, most gun deaths (60 percent) are in fact suicides, while there are many more cases of domestic violence that lead to gun murder than threat from a stranger, burglar, thief, rapist, gang-banger, or “madman.”

Guns can kill you in three ways: homicide, suicide, and by accident. Owning a gun or having one readily accessible makes all three more likely. One meta-analysis"found strong evidence for increased odds of suicide among persons with access to firearms compared with those without access and moderate evidence for an attenuated increased odds of homicide victimization when persons with and without access to firearms were compared." The latter finding is stronger for women, a reminder that guns are also a risk factor for domestic violence. The same thing is true for accidents. States with more guns see more accidental deaths from firearms, and children ages 5 to 14 are 11 times more likely to be killed with a gun in the US compared to other developed countries, where gun ownership is much less common. About half of gun accident fatalities happen to people under 25, and some recent analyses suggest that the official count of gun accident deaths among children is understated. … While everyone is at a greater risk of dying by homicide if they have access to a gun, the connection is stronger for women. In a survey of battered women, 71.4 percent of respondents reported that guns had been used against them, usually to threaten to kill them. A study comparing abused women who survived with those killed by their abuser found that 51 percent of women who were killed had a gun in the house. By contrast, only 16 percent of women who survived lived in homes with guns.

Any overhaul of the Second Amendment or additional restrictions, even with the limitations introduced by Heller, must be effective at reducing gun deaths across the board. But any changes should be more than just race-neutral in theory: they need to be racially neutral in practice and implementation, as well.

I’ve seen several comments that this is an “unhistoric” view and that slaves were never discussed during the Continental Congress. First off, they didn't have to be, the militias of the states were already in place, and had already been used by those states put down various slave rebellions so that is a part of the puzzle regardless of whether that was specifically discuss during the congress or not.

However it just so happens that it ws specifically discussed by several of conventioneers including Patrick Henry.

“If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress . . . . Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia.” And why was that such a concern for Patrick Henry? “In this state,” he said, “there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States. . . . May Congress not say, that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would go to the army should be free.” Patrick Henry was also convinced that the power over the various state militias given the federal government in the new Constitution could be used to strip the slave states of their slave-patrol militias. He knew the majority attitude in the North opposed slavery, and he worried they’d use the Constitution to free the South’s slaves (a process then called “Manumission”).

“Slave Patrol Militias” — That’s what they were, that’s what they are now. That’s exactly what Henry sought to protect. Yes, as I’ve stated above “invasion”, “insurrection” and “corruption of the federal government” were other reasons listed. And I do believe some of them are valid and continue to believe in the need for the 2nd for those purposes — but Slave Patrol Militias was the first reason, I never said, or even intended that it was the only reason. It’s not unhistorical to say it was a influence of the final adoption of the 2nd, it’s unhistorical to pretend it wasn’t.

There is a counter argument to Hartmann’s piece posted on The Root.

They essentially argued that Hartmann is incorrect in the order of things. That the 2nd Amendment wasn’t ratified until sometime after the original constitution — which is true — and that it wasn’t a key portion in getting Virginia to sign on to the new document as the ninth state, New Hampshire had ratified reaching the necessary number of states to complete ratification.

That’s not part of my argument.

They also make the case that the “slave patrols” did not always equal the “state militia” as in some states these existed as two separate entities, and they did. But in some states they were one and the same more than a century prior to 1776. (And this isn’t coming from Hartman)

The slave control militias authorized by the revised Second Amendment were not small affairs. Far from it. They were huge, compulsory networks. George Mason, a Virginia delegate to the U.S. Constitutional Congress who has been called the "Father of the Bill of Rights," confirmed that the southern militias were comprised of all white male citizens with only a few exceptions: "Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers." (Mason apparently didn't consider women, children or people with darker skin to be "people.") These extensive militias had become part and parcel of southern society. Two decades before the Revolutionary War, Georgia passed laws that required all plantation owners or their white male employees to enlist. The Georgia militias were required to make monthly inspections of all the state's slave quarters. According to Professor Bogus, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."

By the time the founding fathers got together to hammer out a Constitution and Bill of Rights, there had been hundreds of slave uprisings across the South. One researcher, Herbert Aptheker, identified around 250 rebellions or conspiracies involving ten or more slaves. The fear of uprisings by African Americans was very real. Many white intellectuals who opposed slavery—including Jefferson, Mason and later Abraham Lincoln—considered it impossible for whites and blacks to live together in peace. Jefferson compared slavery to having “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.” He predicted a race war if the slaves were freed, and a civil war if they weren't. Such was the fear that both Jefferson and Lincoln had plans to deport freed slaves.

Even though Militias had existed in England going back to the 10th century, the point is that in the Southern States of America they were used for a very specific purpose. Yes, there was “protect” from external invasion, but also protection from a slave insurrection.

Looking forward after the Civil War we had another type of Militia — The KKK — who were mainly implementing the same plan, “protecting” the nation from the ex-slaves. This has been engrained in America for a long time, it began before the revolution, the original Constitution didn’t fix it, the Civil War didn’t fix it and the frankly the Civil Right Act didn’t fix it either because at that time we hadn’t even admitted these linkages. We’re barely able to admit them now.

This is still something we need to work on and continue to repair.

For the record these is also a bug that causes updates to initially be posted above the fold on FP diaries. I have to usually go back to into edit to cut and paste them into their proper positions at the end.

It also should be noted that the use of advanced firearms were not only used to protect the America from slave rebellions, they were also used to decimate the native 1st nations of America, as well as colonize just about every nation of Africa, Central America and India.

The gun reshaped the world and the map.

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Part of what has made the vision of Afro-Futurist fictional nation Wakanda in the Black Panther so compelling is that it is a country that has not be colonized, and instead of has developed own it’s own in isolation. What would Africa have become without the trauma of colonization and the slave trade? What would America be if it’s natives were allowed to trade and develop on their own instead of being conquered through genocide? Would the lands of America today resemble a future-native version of Wakanda?

How might the map be different now if gun and rifle technology had instead originated out of China where gun powder was original invented instead of Europe? Or perhaps out of India? Or South America?

Just a thought.