Recently our firm received an email from https://here4thekids.com/ It begins:
Our Objective: This is really simple. We are demanding that Colorado Governor Jared Polis sign an Executive Order banning all guns and implementing a buyback program across the state of Colorado. That’s it.
Reading on, I was pleased to see that the group at least recognized their “Objective” is patently unconstitutional:
Yes, of course this conflicts with the Second Amendment. We realize this. Here’s the deal though: The Second Amendment was enacted to uphold white supremacy. And as a result, guns are now the number one killer of kids in the United States. Isn’t it time to once and for all address the reason out kids are dying every single day?
But they aren’t done, no, not by a long shot. Content to take out-of-context truth about racists using gun laws to oppress minorities, the group then advances the non-sensical position that the Second Amendment is the product of “white supremacy.”
The phrase “you can’t get there from here” comes to mind. How any rational person could make such a statement is beyond my reasoning.
Following the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Second Amendment to the states for the explicit purpose of giving freed men the right to fight back against their white oppressors. See McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010), writing: “The laws of some States formally prohibited African Americans from possessing firearms. For example, a Mississippi law provided that ‘no freedman, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her county, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife.’ … Throughout the South, armed parties, often consisting of ex-Confederate soldiers serving in the state militias, forcibly took firearms from newly freed slaves.”
The post-war Congress, via the Civil Rights Act of 1866, “sought to protect the right of all citizens to keep and bear arms. … Today, it is generally accepted that the Fourteenth Amendment was understood to provide a constitutional basis for protecting the rights set out in the Civil Rights Act of 1866. … Even those who thought the Fourteenth Amendment unnecessary believed that blacks, as citizens, ‘have equal right to protection, and to keep and bear arms for self-defense.'”
In other words, the Second Amendment is an instrument to enable minorities to keep and bear arms for their own protection. It is a fundamental, individual right of all free persons. The idea that the Second Amendment is an instrument of oppression to black citizens is contrary to history and truth.
The flaw in the position is obvious. The Second Amendment bars exactly the types of restrictions here4thekids.com says motivated the passing of the Second Amendment. It’s completely contradictory.
As an example, here4thekids.com cites the Black Panther activities in California. In response to police brutality, “the Panthers decided that they would police the police. Huey P. Newton, who was the co-founder of the Black Panthers along with Bobby Seale, … knew the law, and he knew what the law said about being able to open-carry weapons and the types of weapons you were able to openly carry and how far you had to stand away from the police arresting somebody or interrogating somebody.” Regrettably, here4thekids.com is correct that California and Republican Gov. Ronald Reagan would not stand for black men going armed in defense of their rights so the passed a law banning open carry of arms. A law that violates the Second Amendment. Explain to me again how a restriction on the very government action being criticized “was enacted to uphold white supremacy.”
It is shocking just how wrong here4thekids.com is about this issue.
I’m not even going to discuss how the group differentiates “cis, ablebodied white person[s]” and “person[s] with a marginalized identity” in its feigned anti-discrimination quest.
