The elites and the gun grabbers are desperately counting on racial and other divides in order to exact more gun control, more people control, on the population. The problem, for them, is that we are not so divided as they would like.

Gavin Long, the racist who killed three police officers in Louisiana this weekend had a history of hating “crackers”. However, that did not seem to stop him from shooting and killing black and white officers alike. Even he wasn’t divided; he just saw blue targets. Some would surely love to pounce on these murders to further freedom controls. Hussein Obama wants the police to admit they have a problem. Gersh Kuntzman blames the “gun nuts”. Many will suggest, other issues aside, that blacks (and whites) simply are not safe in our culture of firearms. Facts failing them, they will resort to emotional appeals related to the spate of statistically insignificant but culturally damning shootings of late.

Their problem here, and it is a wonderful problem, with blacks and guns is that blacks have adopted the gun culture. Once upon a time firearms may have been the province of white males in the rural parts. Now, it’s everyone. Men, women, all races – everyone is carrying.

Many blacks astutely recognized the importance of gun ownership years and years ago. In 1867 Frederick Douglass hailed firearms ownership as one of the three hallmarks of a free man and his rights (“the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box”).

From local and state regulations in early America through the Gun Control Act of 1968, many control and prohibition laws were aimed at disarming blacks. One racist strategy was to limit the availability of cheaper guns, “Saturday night specials”, as these were frequently the only arms economically obtainable by blacks (and other groups of lower socio-economic status).

Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court went so far as to list the carrying of arms as a right blacks were not entitled to (as they were not considered citizens). In relegating blacks to either second-class or chattel status, Roger Taney reasoned:

More especially, it cannot be believed that the large slaveholding States regarded them as included in the word citizens, or would have consented to a Constitution which might compel them to receive them in that character from another State. For if they were so received, and entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of the special laws and from the police regulations which they considered to be necessary for their own safety. It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.

Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393, 416-417 (1857)(emphasis added).

The grabbers and the intellectually lazy of the legal education profession for decades overlooked this enumerated right in Scott and as set forth similarly in other cases in favor of a simplistic reading of Miller (1939). I recall reading once in a Constitutional Law book a footnote – the only mention given the Second Amendment – that stated Miller was the only Second Amendment case in history. As the Court did not expressly affirm absolute firearms rights therein, the 2A didn’t confer an individual right and was barely a part of the Constitution.

My reading of Miller, as poor an opinion as Scott, always led me to believe the Court had affirmed an individual right to keep and bear military-grade weaponry. The gun Miller possessed, a saw-off shotgun, was determined to be of no military value despite the use of such guns, martially, for centuries. The short-barreled shotgun has continued to see combat since – most notably perhaps in the tunnels of Vietnam.

It also struck me as interesting that people could lawfully possess weapons of war but might be precluded from possessing “ordinary” arms. If one has a right to a battlefield rifle or a machine gun, what was the harm in owning a bird gun or a .22 plinker?

George Gardner.

Subsequent rulings, this Century, have definitively settled the matter though in a shaded fashion which leaves open the possibility of state meddling.

They want to meddle and they want it badly. Evidence and sound logic ever eluding them, they continue to exploit instances of misfortune and fickle public sentiments. It is a joy and a wonder that their efforts are failing as more and more people wake up. Black, white, yellow, red – all are universally entitled to universal rights, which the left hates and opposes with universal fury.

An armed society is a polite society – for everyone.