The Second Amendment

With all that talk about the Second Amendment I wonder if you knew the real reason for the Second Amendment. Did you know why it says "State" instead of "Country"? Well, much like most early laws 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.

Laws were passed in Georgia, for example, 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 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.

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 that slavery could only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.

Think about it, if slaves had guns then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, and 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 am going to agree with the profound actor Danny Glover who made this comment on the Second Amendment something called CONITEL was developed and the California Governor sign a bill to deny that right.

The fact is that the Second Amendment was conceived largely to preserve the institution of slavery and to suppress Native Americans. Actor and Activist Danny Glover said this recently: “I don’t know if you know the genesis of the right to bear arms,” Glover said. “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 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.

I am a veteran, served this country, and love it but something there is a huge void between fact and fiction. I would suggest that all of us be careful when those on the right and others connect the word of a Dr. Martin Luther King to this debate, as again it is fiction far from fact. And that’s my Thought Provoking Perspective…