The Second Amendment Truth

There is alway talk about the Second Amendment, usually promoted largely by groups like the NRA. Do you know the real reason the Second Amendment was enacted? Did you know why it says, “State” instead of “Country”? Well, much like most early laws, it was for white citizens. The truth is it was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia’s vote. What was called militias initially; it was a reference to “slave patrols” regulated by the states. Slaves were not allowed guns or any weapons!

Laws were passed in Georgia, for example, that required all plantation owners and 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 Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month with authorization to search “all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition”. If weapons were found, the law authorized them to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found in violation.

Let me add that this was not germane to Georgia alone, but most southern slave-holding states! Before and up to the signing of the Constitution hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in many areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings. The fact is slavery could only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of militias.

Think about it, if slaves had guns they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, which means the southern economic and social systems.

I am not going to expound upon this debate further because when black people, i.e., the Black Panthers, tried to exercise their right under the Second Amendment the rules of the game changed. Something called CONITEL was put into play, and the California Governor signed a bill to deny that right. The fact is that the Second Amendment was conceived largely to preserve the institution of slavery.

Actor and Activist Danny Glover said this recently: “I don’t know if you know the genesis of the right to bear arms… The Second Amendment comes from the right to protect themselves from slave revolts, and from uprisings by Native Americans. So, a revolt from people who were stolen from their land or a revolt from people whose land was stolen from, that’s what the genesis of the Second Amendment is.”

Anyone who has read the Constitution knows that it says nothing about the rights of people of color or women. Therefore to think that the Second Amendment had anything to do with the rights of all people are simply wrong.

There is a huge void between fact and fiction. I would suggest that we know the real history and not His-Story; more importantly be careful when those on the right preach propaganda as again fiction is far from fact. And that’s my Thought Provoking Perspective…