Democracy Now! Jun 3, 2021 Do African Americans have Second Amendment rights? That’s the question Emory University professor Carol Anderson set out to answer in her new book, “The Second,” which looks at the constitutional right to bear arms and its uneven application throughout U.S. history. She says she was prompted to write the book after the 2016 police killing of Philando Castile, who was fatally shot during a traffic stop after he told the officer he had a legal firearm. Anderson says the Second Amendment was always intended to be a means of arming white people to control the Black population. “There was this massive fear about these slave revolts, Black people demanding their freedom, being willing to have an uprising to gain their freedom,” says Anderson. “What I saw was that it wasn’t about guns. It was about the fear of Black people.”
Well, I guess we can ignore the British raid on Lexington & Concord to seize powder and guns, thus precipitating the American Revolution. A bothersome detail, best swept under the rug.
We can also ignore that the first gun laws prohibiting “some citizens” from owning rifles was against the Black population after the Civil War in the Jim Crow era. Gun Rights Advocates like the NRA joined with Ronald Reagan in 1967 to ban open carry in California after the Black Panthers showed up at the California Capitol in Sacramento.
We can re-write history all we like and emphasize what fits the narrative.
In the surge to buy guns for self, family and community protection, the Black Community has seen the greatest uptick, followed by purchases by Women, then Oriental & Hispanic communities.
Seeing how there is some 400 million guns in the US, and that some 99.999 percent of gun owners do not use them against the populace is telling. There is some 150 million gun owners in the US.
The question I would ask is what is the underlying cause(s) for violence in the US? Could it be the symptom of systemic failure on multiple levels? Perish the thought.