Friday, December 11, 2009

McDonald vs. Chicago: from a post at Big Government

"In the wake of the Civil War, the former Confederate states began passing a series of laws, ordinances, and regulations that robbed the recently freed slaves and their white allies of their political, economic, and civil rights, including the right to arms. Mississippi’s 1866 Black Code, for example, declared “that no freedman, free Negro, or mulatto…shall keep or carry firearms of any kind.” In other words, America’s original gun control laws were designed to disarm African Americans and leave them at the mercy of predatory state governments.

So the Radical Republicans of the 39th Congress responded with the Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1868, and which was explicitly designed to secure the life, liberty, and property of all Americans from tyrannical state attack. One of the leading figures in this process was Rep. John Bingham of Ohio, the author of the 14th Amendment’s first section (quoted above). In a speech before the House of Representatives, Bingham explained that “the privileges and immunities” protected by the amendment “are chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution.” That quite obviously includes the Second Amendment.

Similarly, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, who presented the Fourteenth Amendment to the Senate, declared that its purpose was “to restrain the power of the States and compel them at all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees,” including “the right to keep and to bear arms.” As the legal scholar Michael Kent Curtis writes in his masterful history No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights, both Bingham and Howard “clearly said that the amendment would require the states to obey the Bill of Rights. Not a single senator or congressman contradicted them.” "

But Chicago(i.e. Daley and every corrupt politician and gun bigot there) thinks the Amendments don't apply to Chicago. Or at least the ones they don't like don't apply. I wonder, have the gun bigots really thought through the implications if the Supremes ruled that a city or state can pretty much ignore an amendment they find inconvenient?

1 comment:

Mattexian said...

Maybe the JPFO should get a few billboards around Chicago and put up their "No Guns for Negros" ads, with an short explanation that this is the same that their "leaders" are doing to them.