The NRA creature at the CNN Town Hall tonight (Dana Loesch) was asked to give her definition of a well-regulated militia. So she trotted out George Mason’s quote “It is the whole people except for a few public officials”. What she failed to mention was that as a southern slave owner, Mason most certainly meant only white people, since he didn’t consider slaves to be people.
She also failed to mention that militias in the southern states were better known as slave patrols and they operated under the control of each state. Southern Founding Fathers like Mason would not ratify the new constitution because of Article 1, Section 8 giving the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia. They feared it would be used by the damn Yankees to end slave patrols and thus their ability to control their slaves. To get Mason and his other southern cohorts to ratify the new constitution, the second amendment had to be modified to guarantee in no uncertain terms that each southern state had the constitutional right to operate a militia to control their slaves.
So congratulations NRA creature. It’s truly appropriate that your justification for no gun control has at its root the fear of not being able to put down slave rebellions.