While the United States of America was always the "Land of the Free," it had a bit of a contradiction. That contradiction was slavery, an abhorrent institution that hundreds of thousands of American men died to end.
And yes, a similar number died to protect. They failed, thankfully.
That history of slavery is something that we need to remember and shouldn't look past, but it's not the root of every problem in America. It's also not the reason for all the policies that many leftists like to believe.
That includes the Second Amendment:
One mass shooting after another, one accidental child death after another tears through this country on an almost daily basis. Once again, lawmakers hide behind “thoughts and prayers,” while clinging to an amendment that has been twisted beyond recognition. But to understand why the Second Amendment exists at all, we must strip away the myths and confront a brutal truth: it was not written to safeguard freedom, but to preserve slavery.
The militias it enshrined were never about defending homes from tyrants abroad but about keeping human beings in chains at home. Until America reckons with this history, we will remain shackled to its bloody legacy.
So, let’s clear a few things up.
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, an action necessary to get Virginia’s vote to ratify the Constitution.
It had nothing to do with making sure mass murderers could shoot up public venues and schools. Founders, including 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 called “slave patrols” and were regulated by the states.
In the South, yes, slave patrols came from the state militia.
However, guess what else came from the state militia? The military force that many of our Founding Fathers wanted to be the sole means of defending this nation. They understandably distrusted standing armies, especially after the British Army was used in law enforcement actions throughout the colonies. They believed standing armies were tools of tyrants and were distrustful of their existence.
The Posse Comitatus Act quelled those fears later on, but the Second Amendment had already been ratified.
The author goes on, of course, and cites leftist academics who have made a career out of misrepresenting the Second Amendment in order to make it like a relic of a racist past, but it's funny how often these same academics fail to look at gun control's history.
In this country, most gun control laws didn't exist to prevent crime, necessarily. They existed to disarm marginalized groups, such as black people, Native Americans, and even Catholics.
Funny how that never makes it into these discussions.
Anyway, back to the discussion of the militia as "slave patrols," the truth is that militias predated the American colonies by millennia. Pretty every empire and kingdom in European history used some variation of a militia – people counted on to fight for their lord who were not professional, full-time soldiers – and that was imported to these shores.
Remember that a lot of our Founding Fathers weren't fans of slavery, after all, and just mentioning the prominent Virginians ignores the fact that a lot of non-Virginians supported the Bill of Rights, too.
But, hey, when you only know one trick, like calling everything racist until people change it, you're going to use that trick for everything.
When the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer, then every nail is white supremacy or something.
