I rarely link to something I see on Instapundit (on the coals-to-Newcastle principle) but today's item about the racist roots of gun control is something I've wanted to investigate for some time. Glenn links to two papers (by the same authors) who assert that the "collective rights" interpretation of the 2nd Amendment has its roots in Jim Crow. The first paper talks about how Southern gun control aimed at disarming blacks to prevent their defending themselves against "Southern Redemption" (i.e. the Ku Klux Klan):
The second paper goes more to the general African-American experience: The "collective rights" interpretation of the 2nd Amendment excluded blacks and immigrants from posessing guns, as they were not accepted into "the militia." This can be viewed in the light of the steady American attempt to regulate and control the civil rights of "undesirable classes", and disarming the underclass was a necessary part of this control:The original Act of 1893 was passed when there was a great influx of negro laborers in this State drawn here for the purpose of working in turpentine and lumber camps.... [T]he Act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers and to thereby reduce the unlawful homicides that were prevalent in turpentine and saw-mill camps and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population.... [I]t is a safe guess to assume that more than 80% of the white men living in the rural sections of Florida have violated this statute.... [T]here has never been, within my knowledge, any effort to enforce the provisions of this statute as to white people, because it has been generally conceded to be in contravention of the Constitution and non-enforceable if contested.The period of Reconstruction and later Redemption was marked by racial violence in a way that the period of slavery was not. Violence on the part of the Ku Klux Klan and other nightriding terrorists were instruments of the oppression of the former slaves and of the maintenance of the Southern way of life. The right to bear arms had been intended by the champions of the freedmen as a hedge against oppression by their former masters, and the right had in fact functioned to this end. White Southerners recognized this, and both the authorities and nightriders sought to confiscate arms from those blacks who had them and often to kill or otherwise cow those who would not give them up. The Arkansas legislature had made clear that restrictions on those weapons that were not useful in war were constitutionally valid. With Haile, they had combined to render safe the high quality, expensive, military issue handguns that many former Confederate soldiers still maintained but that were often out of financial reach for cash poor freedmen.
[Florida Supreme Court, 1941]
One year after the ratification of the Second Amendment and the Bill of Rights [1792], Congress passed legislation that reaffirmed the notion of the militia of the whole and explicitly introduced a racial component into the national deliberations on the subject of the militia. The Uniform Militia Act called for the enrollment of every free, able-bodied white male citizen between the ages of eighteen and forty-five into the militia....The 1792 statute restricting militia enrollment to white men was one of the earliest federal statutes to make a racial distinction....I'd be interested in any links anyone has to this subject, particularly state court rulings around the 1880-1920 period in which the "collective rights" or "militia" interpretation of the 2nd Amendment was discussed. Posted by Kevin Murphy at April 19, 2004 09:02 AM | TrackBack
The willingness of blacks to use firearms to protect their rights, their lives, and their property, alongside their ability to do so successfully when acting collectively, renders many gun control statutes, particularly of Southern origin, all the more worthy of condemnation. This is especially so in view of the purpose of these statutes, which, like that of the gun control statutes of the black codes, was to disarm blacks.
The 1792 Uniform Militia Act limited the definition of "militia" to free men, which certainly had a racial component. And, yes, in the 19th century the right to keep and bear arms was one of the rights that slaveholders most strongly fought to deny to freed slaves.
But modern gun control statutes attempt to restrict gun ownership based on *the class of firearm* rather than the *class of the owner.* There were post-Civil War "black codes" that outlawed or heavily restricted gun ownership by blacks, but these arguably had nothing to do with gun control and everything to do with black control.
Restrictions on types of firearms may be controversial, politically heated and even just plain subjective -- the debate over what the definition of "assault weapon" is, or even if it can be defined, proves that. But Instapundit's cavalier interpretation of these papers essentially posits that, because there have been restrictions on firearms that indeed were "never intended to be applied to the white population," that all such restrictions should be looked at as tainted. Isn't this ultimately a guilt-by-association fallacy?
Actually, the law said WHITE, not "free." There were unfree whites in early America.
The point of the argument is that the "militia" interpretation of the 2nd Amendment has NUCH to do with the fact that blacks were excluded from the militia. The fact that, today, that is not the case does NOT help one argue that the "milita" interpretation is the right one.
The genesis of the interpretation was in large part based on convenience (for excluding blacks and Catholic immigrants from having guns), and is on par with the "grandfather" clauses once used to prevent blacks from voting and claiming state citizenship.
Posted by: Kevin Murphy at April 19, 2004 09:19 PM