Comments by "Jacob Watson" (@jacobwatson3781) on "Colion Noir"
channel.
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@Daddy5444 closer look reveals a very specific impetus for the Second Amendment. In Virginia and the rest of the South, the main function of militias — membership in which was restricted to white men — was to enforce slavery; Henry and the Antifederalists felt that if the federal government dissolved state militias, it would be the end of their “right” to own their fellow human beings.
“Have they [Congress] not power to provide for the general defense and welfare?” Henry insisted. “May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power?”
This isn’t important just because it’s important to know history, or because we have a moral and civic responsibility to understand that our Founding Fathers had a darker side to them. It’s important because it could be cause to reconsider the legal interpretation of the Second Amendment as protecting individual gun ownership, as the Supreme Court ruled in DC v. Heller. The majority opinion in Heller was written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who was famous (or infamous) for originalism, the belief that the Constitution should be interpreted
as the Framers understood it when it was written.
Under originalism, there is no way the Second Amendment can pertain to individual gun ownership, because Henry and the others would never have understood it that way — a guarantee of individual gun ownership could be construed as extending to the slaves and to free people of color, who throughout the antebellum South were barred from owning guns by state laws.
To the Framers, the Second Amendment was always a guarantee of the right of states to form militias. This can be intimated from the language as well: “the security of a free State”, not “country”; and the reference to the “right of the people,” not “right of people,” further suggesting a focus on the collective and not the individual.
Given these militias’ purpose of enforcing slavery, perhaps it could be argued, under originalist thinking, that the Second Amendment has been effectively nullified: With slavery abolished by the 13th Amendment in 1865, it bears inquiring what constitutional force can a guarantee of militias, enacted with the orig
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