XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh   
   From: nowomr@protonmail.com   
      
   Historian Uncovers The Racist Roots Of The 2nd Amendment   
      
   Do Black people have full Second Amendment rights?   
      
   That's the question historian Carol Anderson set out to answer after   
   Minnesota police killed Philando Castile, a Black man with a license to   
   carry a gun, during a 2016 traffic stop.   
      
   "Here was a Black man who was pulled over by the police, and the police   
   officer asked to see his identification. Philando Castile, using the NRA   
   guidelines, alerts to the officer that he has a licensed weapon with him,"   
   she says. "[And] the police officer began shooting."   
      
   In the 1990s, after the assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco,   
   Texas, the National Rifle Association condemned federal authorities as   
   "jackbooted government thugs." But Anderson says the organization "went   
   virtually silent" when it came to Castile's case, issuing a tepid statement   
   that did not mention Castile by name.   
      
   In her new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America,   
   Anderson traces racial distinctions in Americans' treatment of gun   
   ownership back to the founding of the country and the Second Amendment,   
   which states:   
      
       "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."   
      
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   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   
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   Repeal The Second Amendment? That's Not So Simple. Here's What It Would   
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   "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."   
   Interview Highlights   
   The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, by Carol Anderson   
   Bloomsbury Publishing   
      
   On the crafting of the Second Amendment at the Constitutional Convention   
      
   It was in response to the concerns coming out of the Virginia ratification   
   convention for the Constitution, led by Patrick Henry and George Mason,   
   that a militia that was controlled solely by the federal government would   
   not be there to protect the slave owners from an enslaved uprising. And ...   
   James Madison crafted that language in order to mollify the concerns coming   
   out of Virginia and the anti-Federalists, that they would still have full   
   control over their state militias — and those militias were used in order   
   to quell slave revolts. ... The Second Amendment really provided the cover,   
   the assurances that Patrick Henry and George Mason needed, that the   
   militias would not be controlled by the federal government, but that they   
   would be controlled by the states and at the beck and call of the states to   
   be able to put down these uprisings.   
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   On Black people's access to arms after the American Revolution   
      
   You saw incredible restrictions being put in place about limiting access to   
   arms. And this is across the board for free Blacks and, particularly, for   
   the enslaved. And with each uprising, the laws became even more strict,   
   even more definitive, about who could and who could not bear arms. And so   
   free Blacks were particularly proscribed. And so we see this, for instance,   
   in Georgia, where Georgia had a law that restricted the carrying of guns.   
      
   On the Founding Fathers' fear of a slave revolt, which was stoked by the   
   Haitian Revolution   
      
   When Haiti began to overthrow the French colonial masters and were seizing   
   that country for themselves, when Blacks were seizing that country for   
   themselves, the violence of the Haitian Revolution, the existence of the   
   Haitian Revolution, just sent basically an earthquake of fear throughout   
   the United States. You had George Washington lamenting the violence. You   
   had Thomas Jefferson talking about [how] he was fearful that those ideas   
   over there, if they get here, it's going to be fire. You had James Madison   
   worried. ...   
      
      
   Whites ... were fleeing Haiti and were bringing their enslaved populations   
   with them, their enslaved people with them. ... [There was a fear that] the   
   ideas that these Black Haitians would have, that somehow those ideas of   
   revolution, those ideas of racial justice, those ideas of freedom and   
   democracy would just metastasize throughout Virginia's Black enslaved   
   population and cause a revolt. You had that same fear coming out of   
   Baltimore that then began to open up the public armory to whites, saying,   
   "You are justified in being armed because they're bringing too many of   
   these Black Haitians, these enslaved Haitians, up here who have these ideas   
   that Black people can be free."   
      
   On how the Black Panthers responded to restrictions on Black people's   
   ability to bear arms in the 1960s   
      
      
   What the Black Panthers were dealing with was massive police brutality.   
   Just beating on Black people, killing Black people at will with impunity.   
   And the Panthers decided that they would police the police. Huey P. Newton,   
   who was the co-founder of the Black Panthers along with Bobby Seale, ...   
   knew the law, and he knew what the law said about being able to open-carry   
   weapons and the types of weapons you were able to openly carry and how far   
   you had to stand away from the police arresting somebody or interrogating   
   somebody. ... And the police did not like having these aggressive Black men   
   and women doing that work of policing the police. And the response was a   
   thing called the Mulford Act, and the Mulford Act set out to ban open   
   carrying of weapons. And it was drafted by a conservative assemblyman in   
   California with the support and help of an NRA representative and eagerly   
   signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan as a way to make illegal what the Panthers   
   were legally doing.   
       	   
      
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