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Comment by jacobolus | Hacker News Reader

You could start by listening to the interview in question https://soundcloud.com/aclu/do-black-people-have-the-right-t.... Here is a review of the book https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/books/review/the-second-c... or you could try reading the book if you want more details.

American white southerners (and white northerners for that matter) were scared out of their minds about the possibility of a rebellion comparable to the Haitian Revolution, which was contemporaneous with (edit: to clarify, took place during the ratification of) the Bill of Rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution

A guarantee that “well regulated” militias under local control would not be taken down by the federal government was certainly related to slavery. Maintaining wealthy landowners’ power and protecting from slave revolts or other uprisings of disempowered people was perhaps the #1 purpose of those local militias.

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> American white southerners were scared out of their minds about the possibility of a rebellion comparable to the Haitian Revolution, which was contemporaneous with the Bill of Rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution

Wasn't a war for independence in which widespread civilian firearm ownership played a part in winning also kind of contemporaneous with the Bill of Rights?

Played a part in winning? Yeah and I'm sure the tens of thousands of French troops, muskets, the entire French Navy, and a billion livres had something to do with it too. The militia fared so well in 1815, as well.

>American white southerners were scared out of their minds about the possibility of a rebellion comparable to the Haitian Revolution, which was contemporaneous with the Bill of Rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution

That's not accurate. The Bill of Rights was passed by Congress two years prior to the Haitian Revolution.

Virginia voted the Bill of Rights into effect in November/December 1791. The Haitian Revolution was in August.

Both (a) worries about a national government changing the status of slavery against local landowners’ wishes and (b) worries about slave revolts were important for Virginian antifederalists. Maintaining a local militia was a hedge against both.

You are right that the ideas in the Bill of Rights come from earlier. The Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) was the main source of the text of the 2nd amendment: “That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”

Likewise, the Haitian Revolution was not the first slave revolt.

When Virginia finally ratified, they didn't modify the words. The words were the same from years earlier.

I read her book, by the way; I ended up also reading two others over the last week that I think were more compelling, and made her points in a more definitive way. She's totally right that, especially in the Carolinas, slave revolts were one fear that led people to want guns; in fact, a part of the revolution becoming so bloody there was due to that fear; the British governor took the powder away.

The people interpreting her (this was not something she said, at all) are not correct in thinking that this created the full foundation of antifederalist thought, but there was definitely an undercurrent of it in the deep south and to a lesser extent in Virginia.

Unfortunately, she misrepresented some things that appeared to support her conclusion, including the data around gun ownership in the 18th century. No fabrications, just not telling the whole picture. It's a problem endemic to pop history.

I'm still going through my old notes from the letters between the major political players from 1785-1790 and looking for references there so I'm not ready to concede the Henry stuff or that this is the reasoning behind the 2nd's inclusion.

It’s funny how people try to frame the second amendment as racist, when a much clearer case exists for gun control being racist: https://theatlantavoice.com/gun-control-historically-has-mea...

It’s almost as if there’s no principle there and it’s just an effort to smear something you don’t like anyway.

It’s not “funny”. But to borrow your phrasing, it’s almost as though gun access, gun control, gun violence (and threats of violence), gun rights advocacy, and gun-related law enforcement were and continue to be racist, along with quite a lot of the rest of US policy and society. If you read (or even read about) the book you are lazily mischaracterizing you would see that the racism of gun control is discussed there at length.

There is indeed a consistent principle there – white supremacy (and more generally, rich straight white male supremacy). All of the rest – “public safety”, “free markets”, “job creation”, “economic growth”, “liberty”, “equality”, “patriotism”, “justice”, “respect for the law”, “meritocracy”, “republicanism”, “accountability”, “fiscal responsibility”, “originalism”, “family values”, “Christianity”, “truth”, etc. – are secondary, swappable, and dispensable smokescreens. At a glance these post-facto “principled” justifications seem contradictory and hypocritical, but that’s only for listeners who take any of them at face value.

Those who quick-change their claimed fundamental philosophical principles whenever convenient routinely turn around and (to use your term) smear anyone opposed to them.

> gun rights advocacy, and gun-related law enforcement were and continue to be racist, along with quite a lot of the rest of US policy and society… There is indeed a consistent principle there – white supremacy (and more generally, rich straight white male supremacy).

As a non-white immigrant to American, this uniquely American form of self flagellation is remarkable to me. Of all the things I find noteworthy about America and its history, I think of those other things you listed. The “racism” is among the least notable of characteristics. Historical slavery and dominance by the ethnic majority is what America shares with countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East—not what sets it apart!

Sometimes, though, I feel guilty for pushing back on this sort of thinking. This depredation of one’s own history and cultural heritage is incomprehensible to me as a foreigner, but maybe this zealous self loathing is actually what drives America’s distinctive capacity for self improvement.

> depredation of one’s own history

Ah yes, we should all instead celebrate mass murder, slavery, mass incarceration, torture, etc. Hooray for the Battle of Wounded Knee!

While we are at it we should be cheering for children to be shot at school mass shootings, women to die in dangerous pregnancies they were forced to carry to term, innocents to rot in prison after crooked cops planted drugs on them, transgender teenagers to be lynched, and elderly homeless people to die on the street after being defrauded of their life savings.

Because caring about what happens to other people would be “self flagellation”, a deep waste if we could instead spend that attention on working for a big suburban McMansion packed with servants where we can train our own children to be entitled little shits, to prepare them to come out at the top of the coming social turmoil when global warming starts to really wreak havoc. Just don’t let those kids get near public school teachers, Tucker told me they are all pedophiles.

Here’s a concrete example from today of supposed “principles” being completely meaningless for the GOP. https://variety.com/2022/politics/news/hawley-copyright-disn...

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