Guns

Confirmed: Second Amendment Framers Wanted to Protect Slavery

Tommy Christopher was incredulous about Thom Hartmann's report for Truth Out indicating that the framers intended the Second Amendment as a means of protecting slave-holders from slave insurrections. But upon further research, Christopher determined that Hartmann was on the money:

Now, after watching this, I wondered if Hartmann was just extrapolating that Patrick Henry, et al, were talking about slavery, simply by extension of the militias’ slave-suppressing duties, but no, they were actually talking about slave insurrections specifically.

Christopher went on to include the following passage from the Constitutional Convention debate. Hartmann only included a small portion of this documentation:

The 10th section of the 1st article, to which reference was made by the worthy member, militates against himself. It says, that “no state shall engage in war, unless actually invaded.” If you give this clause a fair construction, what is the true meaning of it? What does this relate to? Not domestic insurrections, but war. If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress insurrections. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress. The 4th section of the 4th article expressly directs that, in case of domestic violence, Congress shall protect the states on application of the legislature or executive; and the 8th section of the 1st article gives Congress power to call forth the militia to quell insurrections: there cannot, therefore, be a concurrent power. The state legislatures ought to have power to call forth the efforts of the militia, when necessary. Occasions for calling them out may be urgent, pressing, and instantaneous. The states cannot now call them, let an insurrection be ever so perilous, without an application to Congress. So long a delay may be fatal.

As I wrote the other day, perhaps the Second Amendment should go the way of the Three-Fifths clause.