The Difficult Truth of 1619 — #9

A blog category examining the difficult yet enlightening TRUTH found in The 1619 Project. (I encourage you to read the book!)

Let’s take a closer look at the historical, racist and almost always overlooked hypocrisy of the 2nd Amendment.

“ 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.”

The scholar Carl T. Bogus writes in a law review article, “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment”:

“As a Virginian, Madison knew that the militia’s prime function in his state, and throughout the South, was slave control. His use of the word ‘security’ in the Second Amendment is consistent with his writing the amendment, for the specific purpose of assuring the southern states, and particularly his constituents in Virginia, that the federal government would not undermine their security against slave insurrection by disarming the militia.” (p. 257, The 1619 Project)

”The second amendment, ratified in 1791, codified for white citizens the right to bear arms and to protect themselves. If there were any doubts about who these rights pertained to, they were put to rest in 1800, when Virginia governor James Monroe called out several regiments of the state’s militia to thwart, before it could begin, a widespread revolt planned by an enslaved man named Gabriel, and then to hunt him and the other participants down.”

“As the historian Herbert Aptheker wrote in ‘American Negro Slave Revolts,’ as word of Gabriel’s revolt spread, the ‘nation from Massachusetts to Mississippi was terror-stricken.’ The response was to double down and make more explicit through legislation the prohibitions on Black people owning guns.”

“One Virginian wrote in the local newspaper that ‘we must reenact all those rigorous laws which experience has proved necessary to keep slavery within bounds. In a word, if we will keep a ferocious monster in our country, we must keep him in chains.’” (p. 257. Full documentation available in the Notes section of the book.)

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The 2nd Amendment continues to be misinterpreted and misconstrued today by far-right extremists, the NRA (and the politicians they own), as well as the U.S. Supreme Court.

Just up the road from Robert and me … Daniel Defense — the Gun Death and Murder Company which supplied the assault weapon used in the Texas Uvalde massacre.

Can’t afford two grand? No problem. Three months interest free financing!

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Is there any answer to all this centuries-long deadly injustice?

If so, I surmise it will be found in voting out those politicians who continue to sustain laws (and introduce new ones) which enable potential domestic mass terrorists. Who continue to revel in the glory of guns. Who place the value of the dollar above (far above) the value of human life. Who refuse to even entertain the idea of common sense gun laws.

Midterm elections are on the horizon.

May they portend a new birth of Just Good.