Gerald Horne talking:
first of all, you need to understand that the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which is the calling card for the gun lobby and Washington, D.C., has everything to do with slavery. When the Second Amendment speaks of militias and speaks also of guns, they’re expressing a fear of slave revolts. The Second Amendment did not apply to enslaved Africans. The Second Amendment did not apply to the indigenous population. In fact, it could be considered a capital offense to sell weapons to the Native American population since the European settlers were seeking to take their land.
Likewise, with regard to the Reconstruction era, post 1865, one of the single reasons that the Ku Klux Klan was organized was precisely to disarm newly freed enslaved Africans. That is to say that the Second Amendment did not necessarily apply to black people in the post-Civil War era. And in fact, their Second Amendment rights were basically eliminated. Similarly, if you fast-forward to the 1960’s, even the NRA and the gun lobby sought to push for gun reform after the specter of the Black Panther Party marching to the California legislature with arms in hand helped to outrage and inflame political sentiment, including the political sentiment of then Governor Ronald Wilson Reagan of the state of California. So, you cannot disconnect the history of the Second Amendment from the history of racism and white supremacy.
the Black Panther Party, which, in Oakland, California, at least, was organized in 1966, had, as part of its mantra, as part of its principle to confront the authorities around the question of police brutality and police misconduct and police terrorism. As a result, they marched on Sacramento, California in that regard. And of course, it caused inflamed sentiments to ensue.
it has caused internal disruption within the National Rifle Association that the NRA has been relatively mute about the fact that Mr. Castile apparently had a permit to carry a weapon and yet he was shot by an officer of the state. One can easily imagine that if Philando Castile had not been black, if he had been white, for example, there would have been outrage expressed by the NRA. This helps to solidify the point that I’ve been making, which is that you cannot disconnect the history of the Second Amendment and lobbying for it from the history of white supremacy.
the Ku Klux Klan, not only was a terrorist organization that was formed after the U.S. Civil War to deprive, in the first place, black people of the right to vote, but keep in mind, that it had a second iteration in the post World War I era about 100 years ago, and, in fact, controlled may statehouses, and, in fact, marched in the tens of thousands on Washington, D.C. It was a popular mass-based organization and I daresay that the sentiment that the Ku Klux Klan expressed about a century ago has yet to be extirpated from this society.
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Gerald Horne
Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. He is author of two new books, “The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America” and “Race to Revolution: The U.S. and Cuba during Slavery and Jim Crow.”
— source democracynow.org