GERORGE [sic] E. CURRY: Slavery and the Second Amendment

by George E. Curry
June 1, 2005

...For those who missed it, Rice appeared on CNN s Larry King Live May 11 and talked about her father and his friends arming themselves against nightriders in Birmingham, Ala. in 1962 and 1963. She said,   We have to be very careful when we start abridging rights that our Founding Fathers thought very important. And on this one, I think that they understood that there might be circumstances that people like my father experienced in Birmingham, Ala., when, in fact, the police weren t going to protect you. 

I took issue with her. Since then, a reader directed me to a fascinating 100-page article in the University of California-Davis Law Review [Winter 1997] by Carl T. Bogus titled,  The Hidden History of the Second Amendment.  The Second Amendment reads:  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. 

Bogus, an associate professor at Roger Williams University Law School, wrote:  The Second Amendment was not enacted to provide a check on government tyranny; rather, it was written to assure the Southern states that Congress would not undermine the slave system by using its newly acquired constitutional authority over the militia to disarm the state militia and thereby destroy the South s principal instrument of slave control.