An excellent article! The second amendment had nothing to do with arming the whole country. It was set up so that states with large slave-owning populations could create armed patrols to keep slaves from running away or staging uprisings.
The Second Amendment was Ratified to Preserve Slavery
And just fyi....even now black men are still shot and killed at 8x the rate of white men.
Let's get over the Second Amendment nonsense and ban the guns, especially the automatics and high-capacity magazines!
Super, super, wonderful find, ME. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteGlad you enjoyed it, Sherwood. I loved finding this out.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the comment that "even now black men are still shot and killed at 8x the rate of white men" I think they mostly shoot each other, at least they do in Canada. And that's not supposed to be a racist statement, it's just the way it is.
ReplyDeleteShammy: Here's a little more history on that particular issue:
ReplyDelete"Bennie Montgomery a fellow vet and friend of Williams [author of Negroes with Guns] killed a white man in self-defense. The white man had assaulted him and tried to slit his throat because he asked for his wages at noon instead of at the end of the day. The Ku Klux Klan wanted to come to town for revenge but authorities shipped Montgomery out of town, convicted him and executed him in the gas chamber. When Montgomery’s body was shipped back to his family the Klan said his body belonged to them. They said they was going to come and take the body drag it up and down the streets and then hang and burn it.
Williams and fellow vets made a defense plan at the local barbershop. When the Klan motorcade pulled up in front of the Harris Funeral Home, 40 black men leveled their rifles, taking aim at the line of cars. Not a shot was fired; the Klansmen simply weighed their chances and drove away. That was one of the 1st incidents that got them realizing about resistance in groups. There would be many more incidents of self defense, and finally ten years later Williams would organize a permanent defense group, an “organized militia” for self defense. The NAACP at the time did not believe in self-defense and would vilify him and reduce his chapter temporarily to just him. It would not matter though, he was effective in self-defense, and black people throughout the country were becoming more aware and ready to follow him. The best way for many blacks to really understand self defense tactics would be from Williams, so he wrote “Negroes with Guns“, and in later years, groups like the Black Panther Party helped make self defense a national issue."
Blacks here often do own handguns, whereas other statistics shows that white men over the age of 40 or so often own "long guns"--or rifles & shotguns used in hunting--pheasant, ducks, deer. In my family and my ex-husband's family, everyone had a long gun--often several. The only person I ever knew who had a handgun was my mother. She kept it in her underwear drawer. I'm very thankful that there was no ammunition to be found for this gun, as I often played with it by myself when everyone else was downstairs or gone. That later gave me the idea of keeping ammunition and guns at far different locations when my own kids came along. My dad's last gift to me was a wonderful 20-gauge shotgun, but we kept the shells for that and my ex-husband's 12-gauge in the trunk of our car, which was always locked.
Here in DC, a friend walked into a colleague's office one afternoon as he was packing his briefcase to go home. He was in the act of removing a handgun from his desk drawer. She expressed surprise and shock, but he said, "Every black man here has his piece." Here, meaning DC. I don't know about that, but it's true that most handgun homicides here are black-on-black. Possibly it's a matter of convenience. If you've always got a handgun handy, it becomes acceptable to think of it as an option in situations of self-defense of one kind or another. I am more worried about the people who buy automatics & semi-automatics from Walmart. What for?
Shammy: FYI:
ReplyDeletehttp://hiphopandpolitics.wordpress.com/2013/01/13/got-myself-a-gun-the-history-of-race-based-gun-control/
I posted this on a history forum where many members are gun owners. Among them are the Lost Cause types who still harbor generational resentment from the Civil War against the federal government and "that tyrant in the White House." In a fit of denial they said it's ridiculous that slave owners would need guns to prevent a slave insurrection. Of course to admit such would be conceding that slaves were not happy on the plantation. This is something Lost Causers repeatedly try to deny.
ReplyDeleteI mention this to indicate how deep the roots of this gun culture really are, and how it's virtually impossible to ferret out the cause without understanding history.
Which is to say, thanks for bringing this out. It needs to be part of the conversation about our sick gun culture. Identifying the disease is the first step to curing it.
There is so much to learn about history, and it's astonishing how gullible or uneducated we are. Good for you for spreading other perceptions on such baffling puzzles as the 2nd Amendment.
ReplyDeleteWe do our part... ;)
ReplyDelete