From: cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,soc.women
Subject: Re: Dred Scott and gun Control <was Eva Clayton bio>
Date: 9 Nov 92 18:08:33 GMT
Organization: Optilink Corporation, Petaluma, CA

In article <1992Nov7.232041.27743@u.washington.edu>, tzs@carson.u.washington.edu (Tim Smith) writes:
> meyers@leonardo.rtp.dg.com (Bill Meyers) writes:
> >What irony.  Most black leaders (as distinct from rank-and-file blacks) are
> >supporters, at least in public, of the gun control - really, prohibition -
> >movement.  Do they realize that America's gun-control movement sprouted from
> >the soil of Roger B. Taney, the racist chief justice who wrote the infamous
> >DRED SCOTT decision of 1857?
> 
> How do we know that Taney was racist?
> 
> --Tim Smith

Read the decision.  The language is very clear.

Taney's position, by the way, isn't the source of the gun control
movement, but merely an assertion of it.  In the period before the
Civil War, there is ONE state with a law regulating gun ownership
or carrying that wasn't a slave state: Indiana.  And Indiana's
law was passed at the same session of the legislature as the
provision prohibiting free blacks from entering the state.

The earliest laws that I have been able to find that regulate the
possession of firearms at home applied ONLY to free blacks.

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-- 
Clayton E. Cramer {uunet,pyramid}!optilink!cramer  My opinions, all mine!
The Physician Assisted Death Initiative failed.  Term limits for Congressmen
passed.  If only we could have combined the two... two terms, and a doctor
does lethal injection...