Guns: This is Not a Democracy and the 2nd Amendment is Not What You Think it is

We live under the tyranny of the minority and the 2nd Amendment is grounded upon racism

It is a ghoulish American ritual. Another mass shooting. Another outcry for gun regulation and an assault rifle ban. Speeches made. Prayers offered. No action taken by our government.

Repeat. And again. And again.

I’ve written about gun violence before, but this time I want to look at the two pillars that are the foundation of this ghoulish uniquely American ritual.

Pillar one: This is not a functional democracy. Pillar two: The 2nd Amendment is not what its worshipers pretend that it is.

The vast majority of American citizens want stronger gun regulation and an assault weapons ban, but in this “democratic” country, the majority do not get what they want. Isn’t that odd?

The 2nd Amendment is not a banner of freedom and liberty. Both in the time of our Founders and also in how it has since evolved and been re-interpreted and reinvented in modern times, it has always been about racism.

Yes, I said the 2nd Amendment has racist roots. That is not any “spin” I am putting on it. That is found in its history. It is also found in the evolution of its application. You weren’t taught that in public school, were you? Neither was I.

Despite longstanding accusations that public schools have been hotbeds of liberal indoctrination and CRT, they have always been conservative bulwarks when it comes to teaching early American history. So, you never heard the story of who lobbied to have the 2nd Amendment added to our Constitution and why.

I will tell you that story.

Before I get to that, however, first let’s address this issue of “democracy,” that thing we don’t have in America.

And the vote is …

I want to begin with a Fox News poll. That is right, I am quoting their poll so no one can claim I am giving leftist “fake news” numbers. According to a Fox News poll:

Voters who favor raising to 21 the legal age to buy a gun: 81%.

Voters who favor requiring mental health checks on gun buyers: 80%.

Voters who favor requiring a 30-day waiting period for all gun purchases: 77%.

Voters who favor allowing police to take guns from those considered a danger to themselves or others (known as “red flag” laws): 80%.

Voters in favor of banning assault rifles and semi-automatic weapons: 61%.

Some states have enacted such laws to varying degrees, but since guns are transportable across state lines, the only real solution to our American tradition of assault rifle massacres would be national legislation.

In a democracy, all of the things listed in that poll would now be the law of the land, no contest. The numbers speak clearly. There is even a clear majority for an assault rifle ban.

However, we don’t live in a democracy. Obviously.

Yes, the political scientist would say, quite rightly, that of course America is not and never has been a classic Athenian “democracy” where everybody (well, all propertied men, anyway) votes on everything and decides everything collectively. Imagine if it were. Abortion rights secured, LGBTQ rights secured, assault rifles banned, no more book bans… but I digress.

We are, says that political science professor with the grey beard and pipe and jaunty tweed jacket, a representative republic.

No, good sir, we are not. On paper, yes. Functionally, however, we are not even that.

Our representatives are supposed to represent us, after all. They do not. For some reason, despite numbers running from 60% to 80% of citizens screaming “Do something!” about guns, our so-called representatives choose to ignore us. They choose instead to represent and legislate on behalf of a very small and very loud (and very white) minority of the population, on a whole host of issues, but most particularly on guns.

That is called “tyranny of the minority” and it was one of the greatest fears of the Founders.

Unfortunately, our Founders made tyranny of the minority possible with assorted concessions they made to Southern slave-holder states. Things like counting a Black person as partly human to give those states more representation in Congress. Making the Senate a decidedly tyranny-of-the-minority entity that gives low-population states hugely outsized power in our government. Those are two examples, but there are others.

Their biggest mistake was the 2nd Amendment. Of course, the Founders could not have imagined an AR-15.

Nevertheless, the 2nd Amendment was a concession to a loud and frightened minority: Slaveholders in the South.

History of the 2nd Amendment: The real reason they wanted to protect “militias”

Here are the words 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 way you hear some folk tell the story, the 2nd Amendment is the embodiment of the core ethos of our Founders and the Revolutionary War. These folk tell a story about our Founders wanting us to have guns so that if our government ever starts acting inappropriately, we can take out those rifles to defend ourselves and proceed to enact Revolutionary War 2.0.

This is nonsense. The Founders were concerned with establishing order and the rule of law. They were not interested in, nor wanting to promote the notion, of having a Wild Wild West shoot-out whenever anybody got a bit angry with the government.

So what was the intent and purpose?

Two men were primarily behind pushing for the 2nd Amendment: Patrick Henry (governor of slave state Virginia at the time the Constitution was being written) and George Mason (a leading anti-federalist, one of those people who weren’t too pleased with the Constitution to begin with).

You recognize the name Patrick Henry. Yes, he was the man who said “Give me liberty or give me death!”

You are probably less familiar with the quote from Patrick Henry, lobbying against ratifying the Constitution, when he told the Virginia legislature: “They’ll take your n*ggers away from you!” Yeah, that quote didn’t get repeated so much in history books.

George Mason, you probably don’t know as well. He does have a statue in the East Potomac Park near the Thomas Jefferson Memorial.

It is a modest statue. He looks a bit lonely, doesn’t he? He also has a university named after him, the George Mason University in Virginia. That is a hotbed of Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society alums. It has received multiple millions in donations from the Charles Koch Foundation, with strings attached, of course, on hiring decisions, curriculum… Oh, sorry. I digress.

Both Patrick and George were concerned that the North, being comprised of many people not too pleased with slavery, might use the power of a strong federal government to undermine and weaken Southern state militias which would then leave them vulnerable in the face of the single greatest fear in the South: A slave uprising.

“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State …” Translation: We need a militia to keep us secure from all those Black people we are holding in bondage.

A small collection of very scared racist white people needed their guns. That is why we have the 2nd Amendment.

I highly recommend Carol Anderson’s book The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America if you are interested in reading more on this topic.

She notes that as James Madison set about trying to compose a Bill of Rights (p 32):

“…he believed the ‘great rights’ were trial by a jury, freedom of the press, and ‘liberty of conscience.’ …The right to bear arms and a well-regulated militia… did not make his list… But nonetheless, it was going to rear its head because if there was going to be a Constitution and a United States of America, the Federalists had to respond to Mason’s, Henry’s, and other Southerners’ assertions ‘that the federal government would, in one way or another, render the militia impotent as a slave control device.’”

The 2nd Amendment, she asserts, was a bribe paid to anti-Federalist southerners to get the Constitution ratified.

White people with guns, hurrah; Black people with guns… hmmm, maybe not

You know, back in the 1960s, Republicans were very big on gun control. Ronald Reagan, as governor of California, signed a ban on open carry of loaded firearms. Nationally, there was the Gun Control Act of 1968 which “adopted new laws prohibiting certain people from owning guns, providing for beefed up licensing and inspections of gun dealers and restricting the importation of cheap Saturday night specials [pocket pistols] that were popular in some urban communities.”

The NRA — yes, those “from my cold dead hands” people — were at the forefront of pushing gun regulations and gun restrictions.

Why?

As Elie Mystal put it in his book Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution (p.34):

“The Black Panthers figured out that white people were much less likely to mess with them if the Panthers were openly carrying loaded weapons… It is not as fun to shout the n-word at a Black guy who happens to be carrying a loaded rifle.”

Faced with the frightening sight of Black men with guns, suddenly that 2nd Amendment was not so absolute, and white people suddenly wanted restrictions on guns.

These gun restriction laws were tested in court and found to be constitutional. Regulating guns did not violate the 2nd Amendment, said the courts.

Of course, we all know (women especially now know) the Supreme Court can change its mind on a dime.

On second thought, since we white people are so scared… we need more guns!

In the late 1970s, radicals took over the NRA and invented out of thin air the notion that the 2nd Amendment guarantees the right to “armed self-defense.” Take a moment to re-read the 2nd Amendment. It says nothing about “self-defense.” It is about a “well-regulated militia” providing security for the “State.”

The new radical NRA took control of the Republican Party and got Ronald Reagan to do a 180-degree turn and he signed the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 which rolled back the Gun Control Act of 1968.

The Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society gave us a pipeline of judges that culminated in Justice Scalia creating out of thin air the idea of a constitutional right to own a gun for self-defense. So much for “textualism” in constitutional interpretation. The Supreme Court just completely read out of it that phrase “well-regulated militia,” conveniently dismissing it as a mere “prefatory clause” in their 2008 decision Columbia v Heller.

The dissenting opinions noted that nothing in the text, or even in the historical writings of the times, indicated any sacrosanct right to a gun for self-defense. Also, the plain language of the text did not put limitations upon the power of the government to regulate those guns.

Bottom line

Well, after all, what do the literal meanings of words or historical records or even common sense matter?

What matters is that scared paranoid white people gotta have their guns. Or as Elie Mystal puts it (p. 32): “We live in the most violent industrialized nation on earth because too many dudes can’t admit they still need a night light.”

Assault rifles are impressive night lights.

But how is that working out for you? There were lots of guns in Maine. In Maine, a majority of the citizens favored having a red flag law. The Maine legislature refused to enact a red flag law.

The twin pillars hold: 1) No real democracy. 2) The 2nd Amendment, a malevolent holdover from this nation’s original sin of slavery, still holds its tyrannical sway.

Another AR-15 massacre. There will be another. Maybe next week. Maybe next month. There will be another. And another. And another.

Unless we choose otherwise.

Enough.