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Enemies of the Second Amendment utter more lies
There's a new book out, Carol Anderson's The Second, gaining some publicity, claiming that the Second Amendment was intended to protect slavery. It's a rehash of a claim made over twenty years ago by Carl Bogus. I took it apart in an article I wrote for Cumberland Law Review. My review of the Bogus thesis begins on page 10.
I point out there is zero evidence for it and much evidence against. The first state bill of rights to have a bear arms clause came in Pennsylvania, 1776. The first calls for a federal right to arms came in Pennsylvania (minority report), Massachusetts (Sam Adams) and New Hampshire (majority demands). William Rawle, the commentator who so praised the right to arms, was a member and later president of our first abolitionist society, the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.
There were never grounds for exempting slaves from the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Slaves could and did have guns -- slaves could hunt and that saved slave owners money, when slaves fed themselves. Slaves were a great financial burden, which everyone familiar with the Southern slave economy understands well. Only after the Nat Turner rebellion, when slave holders' arrogant belief that the slaves loved and idolized their masters was burst, did gun control and the night patrols take the guns away and stop the slaves from hunting - and try to keep them from running and rebellion. The Southern narrative was a "passel of lies" designed to justify the "peculiar institution." Gun control was designed to protect the slavers' privileges, just as it is designed to protect the paternalistic privileges of the new society being forged at least partly of elite rules and regulations and special privileges for the underprivileged and those who "protect" and "free" them. Underprivileged minority special category protected victims will never be free. Neither will the subjects of gun control.