Dermezel2
Years ago a
study/article was published in the law review noting that the Second Amendment was largely a tool to enforce slavery. Now we have the Zimmerman trial, and at the same time, an African-American Florida woman was sentenced to 20 years in prison, after a mere 12 minutes of deliberation for firing the gun into the air to scare an abusive husband after invoking the "Stand your Ground" law:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/11/justice/florida-stand-ground-sentencing
Quote:
Saying he had no discretion under state law, a judge sentenced a Jacksonville, Florida, woman to 20 years in prison Friday for firing a warning shot in an effort to scare off her abusive husband.
Marissa Alexander unsuccessfully tried to use Florida's controversial "stand your ground" law to derail the prosecution, but a jury in March convicted her of aggravated assault after just 12 minutes of deliberation.
To quote excerpts of the study:
Quote:
The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.
In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.
In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.
As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."
It seems as though while many things have changed, the Second Amendment seems to still serve primarily as a tool of bigotry and oppression.
“Stand your ground” law helps white defendants a lot more than black ones
Well Dermezel2, I would have to disagree with you. Yes, firearms were used to enforce slavery in some cases, however this is not an inherently bad thing. You have to understand that slavery was not a racists system at first; It was purely an economic system. Blacks were mostly chosen for slavery because of their high physical ability and their low potential for critical thinking and intelligence. Racism only started shortly before the civil war, where white southerners used racism to justify the continuation of slavery. Remember the
Three-Fifths Compromise? This is a prime example.
If anything, the Second Amendment stops crime and prevents oppression in many ways! If you take a look at the statistics, almost all gun crime is committed with guns obtained illegally,* and most gun homicides are committed by blacks.* This shows that law abiding citizens buying and obtaining guns legally are not using them to oppress blacks. In fact, it's the other way around! According to the US Department of Justice, blacks accounted for 52.5% of homicide offenders from 1980 to 2008!* That's a huge number. On the flip side, private gun ownership stop 2.5 million crimes every year.*
Now while I can understand your gripe with the Second Amendment, It is definitely not a tool of oppression. While you and I'm sure many others hold strong beliefs against the Second Amendment, basing those beliefs off of isolated cases and anecdotal evidence is silly. Personally, I believe that the great John Locke which many of our forefathers based their beliefs off of promote and encourage the responsible use of guns. John Locke, the originator of the classic liberal ideology had a strong vision of what he believed to be man's natural rights: Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and property. My pursuit of happiness and freedom is reinforced by the Second Amendment.
-"If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so." - Thomas Jefferson.
-“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
*Kleck, G., "Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America". New York, Aldine De Gruyter, 1991. ISBN 0-202-30419-1.
*http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/gun-deaths/
*Cooper, Alexia (2012). Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008. p. 3. ISBN 1249573246.
*http://rense.com/general76/univ.htm
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