The anti-gun left will never stop inventing reasons that Americans should be deprived of the individual right to keep and bear arms. They hate guns and the people who own and carry them.
You’ll have heard it said by many liberals and even progressives that the Second Amendment centers on arming militias in a post-colonial America. Yet, the reality behind the legal statute that enshrined gun rights in the United States Constitution is more nuanced, and far more sinister.
As Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz notes in her book, “Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment,” the arming of state militias, which ultimately became the National Guard, was already noted elsewhere in the Constitution, so why was there a need to stipulate the right to bear arms in the Bill of Rights, which pertains to individuals? That’s because, according to Dunbar-Ortiz, the Second Amendment can be traced directly back to settler colonialism.
“Basically, the Second Amendment is about killing Indians, taking their land, and increasingly, slave patrols,” Dunbar-Ortiz tells Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer in the latest installment of “Scheer Intelligence.”
The “Loaded” author lays out the genocidal genealogy of the right to bear arms, and explains that, at its root, it ensured the ability of white men to oppress people of color in order to steal or keep stolen land, and to control slaves through slave patrols. To top it off, our current police forces, Dunbar-Ortiz goes on to argue, are essentially just modern-day slave patrols.
– Robert Scheer in The Lies Liberals Tell Themselves About the Second Amendment