None of us who reads this newspaper wants to give up our right of self-defense. We do not want to see our children or spouses taken by force or killed in front of us because we failed to defend them and ourselves. Jesus, seeing his own impending death, told his disciples to do what they desperately wanted to do: go get swords. And Jesus added, "… that the scripture might be fulfilled." Jesus embodied what God intended in Old Testament history.
And yet, we have carnage from guns almost to Old Testament proportions. We are far and away the leader in criminal homicide in the industrialized world, much of it from handguns. "The second amendment is part of the reason our nation tolerates a level of carnage and terror unparalleled in any other nation at peace. The public more or less assumes that the Second Amendment prohibits the kind of gun control regulations that effectively protect pubic safety in other countries." That's the result of extremists having their propaganda believed (UCDavisLawHistory 2nd amendment).
A small minority of them want all guns banned except those designed only for hunting. A larger minority, the opposing extremists pumped up by the National Rifle Association's leadership, wants us all afraid our American government will disarm us and make us defenseless. We in the media have allowed extremists on both sides to dominate the stage of the gun debate. The result has been a boondoggle of billions for a few investors in the huge gun industry in America, and bloody carnage in our classrooms, streets and homes.
I suspect more of us want to return to honoring our American form of government, trusting the democratic values in our whole constitution that honor the protection of individual rights—including individual gun ownership rights guaranteed by legislation in virtually every state. We couldn't believe our Supreme Court in 2008 twisted the 2ndAmendment into this purpose with legislation-from-the-bench. But with research and writing of the legal briefs sponsored by the NRA and the gun industry, and nowhere the investment from citizens for sanity, we got what they paid for.
When the dust settles, the best solution would be to have the old restrictions restored as supported by a huge majority of American gun owners then on what guns we can possess, and where in public places they can be carried. I support a return to the regulations the NRA taught at the safety class my father saw to it I attended over fifty years ago.
The point is clear: gun regulations worked in America then. Australia, Finland and Canada prove they can work again. Removal of those regulations led to proliferation of the very weapons we the people back in the '50's couldn't have imagined then being manufactured and marketed by our gun industry across the world, propagandized with the notion that the more guns we humans have the safer we will be. We teenagers also didn't imagine the NRA would trash their support for regulations to keep children safe from guns.
Now is high time to learn the history of the 2nd amendment ratification missing in our public school history curriculum. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia. Slave states were concerned states should have this right, at least equally. They were afraid abolitionists would use this law to disarm or remove state militias. This was not to be. Hundreds of substantial slave rebellions had already occurred. To handle this threat, states like Georgia had issued a universal mandate for all family heads to own at least one gun to be used in local militias to search slave quarters and proactively end a potential slave rebellion. Virginia representatives to their ratification convention bitterly opposed the word "nation" in the first draft of the 2nd Amendment. It was changed to "state" amid vigorous debate over states' rights to manage and support local armed militias. That's how it was ratified, saving our United States Constitution.
Thus we got the second amendment originally to guarantee what? Can it be the right of state governments' militias to break into family slave quarters at night to confiscate self-defense weapons? —Weapons that could be used to defend a spouse or child from being sold away never to return? —Or to be used, of course hopelessly, to struggle for freedom from this tyranny? This astounding history, echoing down from the Gospels of the Bible, needs further examination.
Is it possible our Supreme Court and nation could have drifted so far from the original intention of our 2nd Amendment? Could refusing to read this history bring a repetition in our homes of what our great-great-grandfathers' slaves suffered from government-supported raids in their homes then?
Check the following links:
Here's the peer-reviewed law school research paper with documents quoted and sources given:
http://www.saf.org/lawreviews/bogus2.htm
This is a summary of that research paper: http://truth-out.org/news/item/13890-the-second-amendment-was-ratified-to-preserve-slavery
Another perspective on this information:
Here's a quick sketch connecting to the gun controversy heating up again
http://civic.moveon.org/nradoesntspeakforme/share.html?rc=testmail&id=62736-9663000-w05CElx
also this
An issue connecting to the same hyped emotion behind the gun issue:
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14012-king-i-have-a-dream-obama-i-have-a-drone
My further comments (not in the column):
High school history instructors don't know this history in the constitutional ratification debates of 1780's because, as I was informed, "the texts don't go into this detail." But why are these documents and proceedings transcripts deleted from our US history texts? The debate over the 2nd amendment when our constitution was finally ratified by the state of Virginia in 1789 is an astounding and crucial history. It's in the details that our children get interested in history, so we have a chance not to repeat past mistakes. When we are helpless old people we don't want our children repeating a history no one wants repeated. The history we don't want repeated (at least that's my bias) is in the documents from the late 1700's in Virginia and the other states where constitutional ratification conventions were held, amid great controversy.
It's already been repeated. The US government did it in Waco Texas in the 80's. Well-organized militias did it routinely, as an arm of state governments, to force entry into homes and disarm people of color in the United States well into the 20th century, a practice originally designed to abort slave rebellions that remains with us in our fears and dreams.
Significantly, the landmark legal action of the Black Panther Party in California has become the foundation of the individual's rights to join in a group collectively bearing arms in public. They did so in a remarkable standoff in a courthouse in California years ago. First of all, the public display of loaded weaponry discouraged officials from apprehended disarming and arresting the Black Panthers. Secondly, the ensuing court challenge to the Black Panthers was so conspicuously against the recent constitutional 2nd amendment interpretation that the state judiciary had to back down. Sources of this are cited in the UCDavis lawreview paper above.
We just don't get it any more. Partly it's because the history of the 2nd amendment's role in the constitutional ratification assemblies 1779 – 89 has been expunged or relegated to insignificance in modern high school history texts. That's worth examining again.
Slaves did not have a right to marriage or family bonding, unless granted for a time by masters, usually for breeding purposes. The prospect of giving slaves freedom, access to weapons and the right to organize to defend their homes and families, threatened the very foundation of Southern gentility. That's what was read into the original wording of the 2nd amendment, and blocked the whole constitutional ratification process, until the word "state" was entered in place of "nation." Controversy seethed as ratification assemblies repeatedly failed to reconcile the constitutional language granting "equal rights" with the 2nd amendment wording granting the federal government oversight of all organized militias. With the change from "nation" to "state" in the 2nd amendment draft, the slave state of Virginia came on board with the ratification assembly and voted for ratification of the Constitution of the United States. Thus the right of government (state government) to forceably enter sleeping quarters of certain human beings with children and confiscate weapons including guns was upheld by the 2nd amendment to the constitution as written. Any historians out there, gun owners like me, with comments?
David Graber
RR 1 Box 1211D
631 Woodley Ln
Hardin, MT 59034
406 665-3373
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org
Bonnie's email graberbj@gmail.com
