This reference to the 2nd Amendment is a head scratcher only if you don’t know that 2nd Amendment was in fact created to ensure Southern slaveowners the right to maintain & arm slave patrols to put down insurrections amongst the enslaved. Now he’s invoking agnst their descendants https://t.co/9anFgRjQCm
— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) June 1, 2020
What’s most misleading about [Nikole] Hannah-Jones’s distortion of the Second Amendment, however, is that the first gun-control laws were all racist in intent, meant to keep newly freed black Americans subjugated. “Black Codes” instituted after the Civil War made owning guns illegal for most blacks, and continued to put them at the mercy of racist governments. Arguments made during the debate over the 14th Amendment often specifically mentioned the right to bear arms.
What’s most ironic about Jones, who names herself after 19th-century civil-rights leader Ida B. Wells, is that the historic figure was a champion of the Second Amendment. She maintained that an important lesson of post–Civil War America, one that “every Afro American should ponder well,” was “that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”
The Second Amendment certainly wasn’t a head scratcher for the real Ida B. Wells.
– David Harsanyi in The 1619 Distortion of the Second Amendment