It's a myth that the right to bear
arms stemmed from the Founders' wish that Americans be free to stage an armed
rebellion against our own government, should it become tyrannical.
By Ron Carver
I
don’t hunt, but I have nothing against hunters or owners of rifles, bows and
arrows, or boomerangs. However, I am against vigilantes and those, like the NRA
leaders, who encourage them.
I
had my own run-in with vigilantes when I joined the movement to end segregation
and guarantee all citizens the right to vote.
After
weeks of death threats delivered by phone to our Freedom House in Starkville,
Mississippi, I was alone on a November night in 1964 when three armed and
drunken Klansmen banged on the door of our two-room shack. I demanded to know
who was there, and a chill ran through my body when the white men responded,
“just us niggers.”
There
wasn’t a stick of furniture I could use to defend myself, only the bar across
the door. But lift and wield it, and the front door would swing open. And who
could I phone for help? The sheriff? The chief of police? For all I knew, they
were waiting out front, too.
Terrified,
I slammed through the nailed-shut back door and slid on my belly down the hill
into the darkness, as fast as I could.
That
was one incident in a violent, bloody year.
Armed
Klansmen burned 50 African-American churches and kidnapped and killed three
civil rights activists in an infamous attack that became a pivotal moment in
the civil rights struggle. During the search for Andrew Goodman, James Cheney,
and Michael Schwerner, Lyndon Johnson sent Navy sailors to scour Neshoba
County’s riverbeds.
They didn’t find them, but they uncovered the corpses of
dozens of African American men. It was a time and place where any crime was
tolerated if it preserved the segregationists’ “way of life.”
In
the previous hundred years, thousands of African Americans had been lynched, as
documented in scores of gruesome photos that were proudly sold as souvenirs.
It
is no surprise to me, then, to learn that James Madison’s reason for proposing
the Second Amendment in 1789 was to preserve the state militias, the white
population’s “principal instrument of slave control.” As documented in The Hidden History of the Second
Amendment, an article published in 1998 in the University of
California, Davis Law Review, these militias (often called “slave patrols”)
were tasked with periodic sweeps of plantations to seek runaway slaves and
intimidate any who dreamed of freedom.
Today,
the proliferation of armed hate groups, which sometimes call themselves
militias, is at least as dangerous as isolated, unbalanced, and gun-toting men
with scores to settle. The number of anti-government so-called Patriot groups,
such as armed militias, grew by 755 percent in the first three years of
President Barack Obama’s first term, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The number of these groups rose from 149 at the end of 2008 to 1,274 in
2011, the SPLC reports.
Hate
groups have expanded into every state but Hawaii. They are in everyone’s
backyard.
The
atmosphere today is toxic. Radio talk jocks promote armed struggle and one
security industry executive boasts on YouTube that he would “start shooting
people” in response to new gun controls.
For
more than a hundred years the NRA promoted sportsmanship and responsible gun
ownership — period. But since extremists seized control in 1977, the
organization has forced a stranglehold on Congress while promoting the myth
that the Second Amendment was enacted to facilitate armed rebellion against our
own government, should it become tyrannical.
I
support the right to own guns, but we don’t need 30 rounds in a semi-automatic
weapon — or a well-armed militia — to bag a deer. I draw the line when my
fellow citizens turn their homes into armories and begin training for
insurrection. We used to call that treason.
Ron Carver, a former Student Non Violent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC) field organizer, is an Institute for Policy
Studies associate fellow. IPS-dc.org. Distributed
via OtherWords
(OtherWords.org)