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FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED JULY 16, 2000
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz

Last time we dug into Yale Law professor Akhil Reed
Amar’s impressive 1998 tome “The Bill of Rights” (due out in
paperback this month), the good professor — neither a gun
owner nor in any sense a “right-wing militia nut” — demon-
strated through historical research that the gun-grabbers
are wrong: The Second Amendment does not merely protect
firearms ownership by active duty members of the National
Guard. Rather, it conveys the right to own and carry wea-
pons of military usefulness to all Americans.

But now that this undead golem of those who despise our
Bill of Rights is down, let’s proceed to stake it through
the heart.

For you see — while the Second Amendment is (start
ital)sufficient(end ital) to guarantee the right of citizens
to own machine guns (not to mention rifles, pistols, “as-
sault weapons,” and shoulder-launched missiles) — it’s not
even the best guarantee of this right. The whole debate
over the (start ital)Second(end ital) Amendment, professor
Amar points out, has largely distracted us from considering
a pair of enactments even more directly on point: the 14th
Amendment and the original, 1866, Civil Rights Act.

We rejoin professor Amar at page 258:

“At the Founding, the right of the people to keep and
bear arms stood shoulder to shoulder with the right to vote;
arms bearing in militias embodied a paradigmatic (start
ityal)political(end ital) right. … But Reconstruction
Republicans recast arms bearing as a core (start
ital)civil(end ital) right, utterly divorced from the mili-
tia and other political rights and responsibilities. Arms
were needed not as part of political and politicized militia
service but to protect one’s individual homestead. Everyone
— even nonvoting, nonmilitia-serving women — had a right
to a gun for self-protection. …

“The Creation vision was public, with the militia
muster on the town square. The Reconstruction vision was
private, with individual freedmen keeping guns at home to
ward of Klansmen and other ruffians. …

“Alongside …the Civil Rights Act of 1866 … Con-
gress passed the Freedman’s Bureau Act, a sister statute
introduced the same day by the same sponsor. … The
Freedman’s Bureau Act affirmed that ‘laws … concerning
(start ital)personal(end ital) liberty, (start ital)person-
al(end ital) property, (start ital)personal(end ital) secur-
ity, and the acquisition, enjoyment and disposition of
estate, real and (start ital)personal, including the consti-
tutional right to bear arms(end ital) shall be secured to
and enjoyed by all citizens. …’ Thus, the Reconstruction
Congress expressly repudiated (start ital)Dred Scott(end
ital)’s claim that because free blacks could never be citi-
zens, they lacked many of these basic rights.”

Allow me to interrupt the good professor to point out
that the opposite also holds true. Though modern-day black
Americans tend to despise antebellum Supreme Court Chief
Justice Roger Taney for ruling in (start ital)Dred Scott(end
ital) that black Americans were neither citizens nor men,
they might want to go back and re-read his logic. They will
find the devil unintentionally gave them their due. Taney
said blacks could not be considered men or citizens, because
if they were so considered, (start ital)there would be no
option but to allow them to own and carry arms without
restriction.(end ital)

Quick, now: which side won the Civil War? Can a law-
abiding black citizen today buy a 30-caliber machine gun and
drive it home in the back of his pickup truck without seek-
ing massa’s “permission”?

Why was the 14th Amendment — darling of the left when
it appears to justify the expansion of federal power —
enacted? Professor Amar explains: “Southern states, ever
fearful of slave insurrections, enacted sweeping antebellum
laws prohibiting not just slaves but free blacks from owning
guns. In response, antislavery theorists emphasized the
personal right of all free citizens — white and black, male
and female, northern and southern, visitor and resident —
to own guns for self-protection.”

Really? But what chance does a law-abiding citizen of
any color have today, of carrying his self-defense pistol
with him if he chooses to visit the collectivist metropolis-
es of Los Angeles, Washington or New York City?

“In the 1846 case (start ital)Nunn vs. Georgia(end
ital),” professor Amar continues, “the proslavery contrarian
Chief Justice Joseph Henry Lumpkin proclaimed not only that
the Second Amendment bound the states but also that ‘The
right [is guaranteed to] the whole people, old and young,
men, women, and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear
arms of every description, and not merely as are used by the
militia.’ …

“Roger Taney and [prominent abolitionist] Joel Tiffany
hardly saw eye to eye in the 1850s, but they both agreed on
this: (start ital)if(end ital) free blacks were citizens, it
would necessarily follow that they had a right of (start
ital)private(end ital) arms bearing. According to (start
ital)Dred Scott(end ital), the ‘privileges and immunities’
of ‘citizens’ included ‘full liberty of speech in public and
in private … and to keep and carry arms wherever they
went.’ …

“One of the core purposes of the Civil Right Act of
1866 and of the Fourteenth Amendment was to … outlaw the
infamous Black Codes [by which the southern states sought to
ban firearms for freed blacks], and affirm the full and
equal right of every citizen to self-defense. …”

Professor Amar quotes Sen. Samuel Pomeroy, declaring
on the floor of the Senate in 1866, “Every man … should
have the right to bear arms for the defense of himself and
his family and his homestead. And if the cabin door of the
freedman is broken open and the intruder enters for purposes
as vile as were known to slavery, then should a well-loaded
musket be in the hand of the occupant.” Even Rep. Henry
Raymond, a founder and editor of the New York Times, de-
clared that the black freedman “has a country and a home; a
right to defend himself and his wife and children; a right
to bear arms.”

“Today’s NRA,” professor Amar concludes, “pays far too
much attention to 1775-91 and far too little to 1830-68.”

But is this curious forgetfulness about the original
meaning of “Civil Rights” merely an accident? Where do the
modern forces of “gun control” — including the nation’s
largest gun-control organization, the National Rifle Asso-
ciation, which endorsed the federal gun control acts of 1934
and 1968 and the “compromise” Brady Law with its national
gun-buyer registry — now focus their energies?

What race predominates among the subsidized housing
projects where HUD now claims it needs no search warrants to
root out and seize “dangerous firearms” — while the cheer-
leader NRA urges the government to “rigorously enforce the
gun laws already on the books”? Where are most of the “gun
buy-back” stunts conducted? Among the racial minorities of
the inner cities, of course. What is the derivation of
“Saturday Night Special” — describing the inexpensive self-
defense handgun which the NRA says it’s OK to go ahead and
ban as long as we rich white folk are allowed to keep our
engraved fowling pieces?

Cover your ears if you like, but the origin of this
term for the inexpensive handguns most useful for self-
defense to a black or Hispanic resident of the inner city is
the old, derogatory police slang “******town Saturday
Night,” referring to inner city weekend violence not merit-
ing much attention, since it mainly occurred among the black
folk.

When handgun “licenses and permits” require expensive
safety courses and the OK of the local sheriff, and one-
third of our young black men today have experienced some
kind of run-in with the legal system and are thus blocked
from even applying, what percentage of these “permits” end
up issued to black folk?

And when gun-grabbers try to terrify the soccer moms
with visions of “inner-city street gangs armed with fully-
automatic AK-47s,” what color skin do you imagine those
soccer moms are picturing on Ernesto, Raoul, Dante and
Ahmad?

You see, those who would ban the private ownership of
weapons of military usefulness to individual American today
are not just liars … they’re also racists.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor
of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, “Send
in the Waco Killers” is available by dialing 1-
800-244-2224.

***

Vin Suprynowicz, [email protected]

“The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him
who resists it.” — John Hay, 1872

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep
the populace alarmed — and thus clamorous to be
led to safety — by menacing it with an endless
series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” —
H.L. Mencken
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