Was the 2nd Amendment included in the U.S. Constitution for racist reasons?

Some have argued that the 2nd Amendment has racist roots......But does it really? ----------------- TIMESTAMPS ----------------- 0:00 Intro 0:39 2nd Amendment is Not Racist 1:25 Ancient Right to Bear Arms 3:08 Northern States Recognized Gun Rights 5:20 Mostly Northern States Pushed For 2A 7:29 Wrap Up ----------------- The Four Boxes Diner serves up hot, fresh Second Amendment and gun rights news and analysis. Here you’ll find everything you need to understand and defend YOUR constitutional rights including your right to keep and bear arms. In just a few minutes, you’ll get the inside scoop from constitutional attorney Mark W. Smith, who is a member of the United States Supreme Court Bar, a New York Times bestselling author, a Presidential Scholar at the King’s College, a frequent Fox News guest, and the author of First They Came for the Gun Owners, The Official Handbook of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, and Duped: How the Anti-gun Lobby Exploits the Parkland School Shooting, and How Gun Owners Can Fight Back. ----------------- SUMMARY ----------------- Some anti-gun activists will tell you the 2nd Amendment has racist roots. They claim that the United States recognized the right to keep and bear arms to keep African Americans enslaved. History tells a different story. Here’s a headline that recently graced the cover of the New York Times Book Review: “Was the Constitutional Right to Bear Arms Designed to Protect Slavery?” The book under review, Carol Anderson’s The Second, tries to argue that the answer is yes. But even the New York Times reviewer admits that Anderson’s argument is “unconvincing.” The Second Amendment was based on the right to arms that the British enacted in their 1689 Declaration of Rights. The Brits’ declaration of the right to arms had nothing do with slavery. They enshrined the right because the Catholic King James II had disarmed Protestants in England. When the British overthrew James and installed the Protestant William and Mary, they enacted a right to arms to make sure that that abuse never happened again. In 1776, Pennsylvania became the first state to guarantee the right to bear arms. Four years later, Pennsylvania passed the first state act abolishing slavery. In 1777, Vermont adopted the first state constitution that both included a right to arms and abolished slavery. In 1780, the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights included a right to arms. A couple of years later, Massachusetts courts declared slavery unconstitutional in the state. So instead of the slave states, it was the anti-slavery northern states that pioneered the right to keep and bear arms in America. The third reason why the Second Amendment is not racist has to do with how it was adopted. If the anti-gunners’ claim was right, then you’d expect the slaveholding South to be pushing for an amendment protecting the right to arms. But in fact, it was mostly northern states that pressed for the Second Amendment. For example, at the Massachusetts ratification convention, Samuel Adams insisted that Congress should not be able to “prevent the people of the United States…from keeping their own arms.” Similarly, Pennsylvania asked the federal government to enact an amendment recognizing “that the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and their own state, or the United States, or for the purpose of killing game.” Number one, the Second Amendment is based on an English right from 1689 that has nothing to do with slavery or race. Number two, the amendment followed in the footsteps of arms guarantees that anti-slavery northern states adopted. And number three, several non-slave states in the North pushed for the Second Amendment to be included in the Bill of Rights. The real issue is not that the Second Amendment is racist. It’s that America for far too long denied blacks the full rights of citizenship—including the right to keep and bear arms. Frederick Douglass understood that the right to arms is crucial for freedom. In 1863, Douglass asked, “Shall we be wholly free, an equal at the ballot-box, at the jury-box, and at the cartridge-box, with the white man?” It was no accident that Jim Crow laws severely restricted African Americans’ right to carry. FURTHER NOTES AND READING: England did have slaves though when slavery itself became unlawful in England itself could be subject to some debate. But for the purposes of this video, it suffices to state that England did not have a large domestic slave population of the sort that we saw in the Southern United States in the 18th and 19th centuries. See Our English Declaration of Rights Video here    • Get Smart Gun Owners--Learn the Hidden His...   For a detailed discussion of the use of gun control laws to deny African Americans the right to keep and bear arms, see this Supreme Court brief. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPD... Brief of National African American Gun Association Inc.pdf