It’s time to repeal the Second Amendment.
There, yes, I said it. It’s a poorly-worded, grammatically ambiguous (at best) concession of a “right” that is neither inalienable nor logical, written into the Bill of Rights by white men of privilege who also believed it was acceptable to own other human beings (who they didn’t even conceive of as fully human).
This is the text of the Amendment:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Annotated Constitution on Congress.gov
This is some bullshit. It’s about protecting the “right” of (white) people to own weapons so they could constitute a “Militia,” on a state level as opposed to a federal military. Do you know what the purpose of the militia was, at that time?
The answer you’re taught in school is to be a check against government tyranny, fresh on the minds of those who oh-so-recently threw off the yoke of British rule. Sure, sure, maybe.
The real purpose of the state militias was to suppress insurrections. But, hmmmm, what sort of insurrections could they possibly have been worried about?
Slave rebellions, of course. The white population lived in fear of insurrection from a subjugated Black population that vastly outnumbered them.
(Naturally, there are going to be those of you who immediately try to counter with “But Shays’ Rebellion…” or “But the Whiskey Rebellion…” Don’t. Just don’t. Go read your history.)
The main function of the militia, particularly in the southern states, was to police the slaves. Slave states were worried that without such a right spelled out in the Constitution, they would be unable to prevent insurrections by the enslaved, which to them posed the gravest threat. So the Second Amendment was adopted as a concession to the slaveholders and to preserve slavery.
It’s a racist artifact that should have been omitted.
Ohhhh look out, did I just engage in CRT???
I’ll be clear: there is no inherent, inalienable right to own a gun, especially not a military-grade automatic weapon, despite what the gun perverts will tell you and despite what a bunch of racists insisted get codified in the Bill of Rights.
The Second Amendment today is used by the gun perverts and Republicans as a shield, enabling them to do what they do best—enable (if not outright perpetrate) the mass murder of children in schools. And people in shopping malls, grocery stores, churches, at concerts, on the street, and so on. It’s sick.
It’s time to repeal the Second Amendment.