After 100 activists with a pro-immigration reform group went to Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s home last Saturday, to peacefully speak out in protest of his efforts to implement a version of Arizona’s SB1070 anti-immigrant law for The Sunflower State, Kobach was so threatened or insulted or disrespected he told Fox News on Monday “It’s important to realize there’s a reason we have the Second Amendment.”
No, Mr. Kobach. The ONLY reason the Founders included the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights was the need to pacify the South’s fear of a threat to slavery in order to ratify the constitution.
As someone who was educated at Harvard, Oxford and Yale, you should probably know this. We should all know this. More below ....
The United States Constitution was written and introduced in September of 1787 during the Philadelphia Convention. According to Article VII it had to be ratified by nine of the 13 states before it went into effect. By May of the following year, despite seven states on board (Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maryland), there was serious concern for the fate of the Constitution.
Rhode Island was against it because of concern over the amount of influence it would have as such a small state and New York and New Hampshire were also leaning against ratification due to anti-Federalist views. Then there were Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, states where slavery was important to their economy. They knew the Northern states wanted slavery to end and demanded assurances that the new government would not abolish or directly interfere with the slave system. South Carolina’s Pierce Butler, recognized as one of our founding fathers, made this very clear at the Constitutional Convention, declaring, "The security the Southern States want is that their negroes may not be taken from them which some gentlemen within or without doors, have a very good mind to do."
The Constitution addressed the issue of guns in Article 1 Sec 8, reading “To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions. To provide for organizing, arming and disciplining the Militia and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively the Appointment of the Officers and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.”
To states like Virginia and South Carolina, where regulated slave patrols were common in order to show the indentured servants that white men were armed, vigilant and ready to use force in order to control them, the thought of having to give up their guns except in cases of threat to the new country was a definite deal breaker.
So to persuade the southern states to ratify, but especially to assuage Virginia, home to George Washington and James Madison, the framers agreed to allow them to maintain their system of terror and slave patrols. As part of the promised Bill of Rights, which was necessary to appease the anti-Federalists, they agreed on an amendment that said, “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.”
Based on these assurances, South Carolina, New Hampshire and then Virginia ratified the U.S. Constitution in June of 1788. And the rest, as they say, is history.
The Second Amendment was nothing more than a shameful compromise to please the slaveholders in order to ratify the United States Constitution. It was not an expression of liberty, freedom or safety; it was an amendment of oppression and exploitation of human beings for profit – nothing more.