The Strange Career of the Second Amendment, Part II

http://solidarity-us.org/atc/199/second-amendment/
Date Written:  2019-03-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2019
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23490

A further look at the history of the Second Amendment. Focuses on late 19th and 20th c and disparity of the laws in regard to race.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

As states moved to ban concealed weapons and eventually to criminalize the possession of certain kinds of weapons, courts struggled to articulate which view of the right to bear arms - civic or individual - held sway. Court decisions articulating the view that the right encompassed an individual right were often met with consternation, and in general the public expressed the view that "the people's right to be free from the threat of violence took precedence over the individual’s right to arm himself."

Yet the articulation of an individual rights conception had been voiced and would gain adherents over time. Arguments in favor of an individual rights interpretation came from two opposing - yet interrelated - quarters: a growing critique of slavery and its endemic violence and the growing grip of cotton production on the slaveowning southern states....

When it came, once again, to the question of disarming Black men, the calculus is different. The NRA supported the Gun Control Act of 1968, which was certainly designed to remove weapons from the Black Panthers, who had openly displayed firearms.

It was in the 1970s, as noted above, when the NRA turned toward the view that it has increasingly embraced: any regulation on guns is an infringement of a constitutional right to the possession of guns.