The horrible mass murder in Parkland, Florida and the outpourings of
protest against gun violence have sparked widespread debate. People are
struggling to understand why this violence keeps happening
What are the roots of the gun violence that takes so many lives in
this country? Is the problem the guns? Why does the National Rifle
Association seem to have such power and influence? Would putting even
more police into schools protect students or endanger them?
These important issues need serious responses--but most answers out
there don't get to the reality of the situation in the U.S. today, or
the history that has led to this juncture. Revolution has addressed these issues in previous articles, and we encourage people to dig further into the works by Bob Avakian linked from this article.
Here we focus on three major points of contention: the Second
Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the National Rifle Association, and
the role of police in schools.
The 2nd Amendment--Enforcing a White Man's Constitutional Right to Genocide and Slavery
The authors of the U.S. Constitution did not put the Second Amendment
into the Bill of Rights to ensure people's right to resist a federal
tyranny, as today's fascists often say. It wasn't even about the right
of individuals to own guns.
It was all about arming white men to control and suppress
slaves--African people and people of African descent, and to drive Native
Americans off their land, including by killing them.
For one thing, "the people" in the original U.S. constitution excluded
slaves and Native Americans. White women were barely considered.
Everyone at the time who read this Constitution--and certainly those who
wrote it--knew that it was only talking about allowing white men to be
armed.
Historian Carl T. Bogus wrote that James Madison wrote the Second
Amendment to assure Southerners that the federal government couldn't use
its powers to stop slave patrols. There were hundreds of documented
revolts and "conspiracies" by slaves before U.S. independence, and, as
Bogus wrote, "Southerners were terrified of slave revolts and very much
obsessed about possible insurrections during the late eighteenth
century. They invested enormous energy in maintaining a slave patrol
system, in which white patrollers worked throughout the night to stop
blacks from moving about without permission, to search black homes for
weapons and other contraband, and to administer lashings to blacks who
committed infractions."
The militias enshrined in the Second Amendment had existed for
decades, and as another author pointed out, when the colonies agreed to
become states these militias "were expected to continue fulfilling two
primary roles in the United States: destroying Native communities in the
armed march to possess the continent, and brutally subjugating the
enslaved African population."
These bloody origins of the Second Amendment continued to shape how
gun rights developed in this country through the years; armed posses of
slave catchers; scalp hunting parties of whites killing
Article: The Second Amendment, the NRA, Police in Schools--Gun Violence and White Supremacy
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