From: bb063@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Christopher J. Crobaugh)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: RE: Innis' "Racist Soil"
Date: 9 Sep 1992 11:16:56 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (USA)
NNTP-Posting-Host: slc4.ins.cwru.edu


Heeeeere's Roy!



Reprinted Wall Street Journal 11/21/91


GUN CONTROL SPROUTS FROM RACIST SOIL

by Roy Innis

  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?  In the early part of the 19th century, Dred Scott, a black
slave, had been taken by his owner from Missouri, a slave state, to
Illinois, a free state. From there he was taken into the Wisconsin
territory, free territory above the 36 30' latitude of the Missouri
Compromise.  After living in free territory for a while, he
returned with his owner to Missouri.

When his owner died in 1846, Scott sued in the state courts of
Missouri for his freedom, on the ground that he had lived in free
territory.  He won his case, but it was reversed in the Missouri
Supreme Court.  Scott appealed to the federal courts, since the
person he was actually suing, John Sanford, the executor of the
estate that owned Scott, lived in New York.

It was in that setting that Chief Justice Taney made his infamous
rulings:

1. That black people, whether free or slave, were not citizens of
the U.S.; therefore, they had no standing in court.

2. Scott was denied freedom.

3. The Missouri Compromise was ruled unconstitutional.

Well known to most students of race relations is the former
attorney general and secretary of the Treasury's pre-civil war
dictum that black people "being of an inferior order" had "no right
which any white man was bound to respect." 

Much less known are his equally racist pronouncements denying black
people, whether slave or free, specific constitutional protections
enjoyed by whites.

In DRED SCOTT Chief Justice Taney, writing for the court's
majority, stated that if balcks were "entitled to the privileges
and immunities of citizens... [i]t would give persons of the negro
race, who were recognized as citizens in any one state of the
union, the right... to keep and carry arms wherever they went.  And
all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the
same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing
discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the
peace and safety of the state..." 


Although much of Justice Taney's overtly racist legal reasoning was
repudiated by events that followed - such as the Civil War and
Reconstruction - the subliminal effects were felt throughout that
era.  In the post-Reconstruction period, when the pendulum swung
back to overt racism, Justice Taney's philosophy resurfaced.  It
was during this period that racial paranoia about black men with
guns intensified.  It was potent enough to cause the infringe- ment
on the Second Amendment to the Constitution's "right... to keep and
bear arms."

Under natural law, a freeman's right to obtain and maintain the
implements of self-defense has always been sacred.  This right was
restricted or prohibited for serfs, peasants and slaves.  Gun
control was never an issue in America until after the Civil War
when black slaves were freed.

It was this change in the status of the black man, from slave to
freeman, that caused racist elements in the country (North and
South) to agitate for restrictions on guns - ignoring
long-established customs and understanding of the Second Amendment. 
The specter of a black man with rights of a freeman, bearing arms,
was too much for the early heirs of Roger Taney to bear.

The 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, along with the
various Reconstruction civil rights acts, prevented gun
prohibitionists from making laws that were explicitly racist and
that would overtly deny black people the right to bear arms.  The
end of Reconstruction signaled the return of Taneyism - overtly
among the masses and covertly on the Supreme Court.  Gun-control
legislation of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, enacted at
the state and local levels, were implicitly racist in conception. 
And in operation, those laws invidiously targeted blacks.  With the
influx of large numbers of Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants
into the country, gun laws now also targeted whites from the
underprivileged classes of immigrants.  Eventually these oppressive
gun laws were extended to affect all but a privileged few. 
Throughout the history of New York state's Sullivan law, enacted at
the start of the 20th century, mainly the rich and powerful have
had easy access to licenses to carry handguns.  Some of the
notables who have received that privilege include Eleanor
Roosevelt, John Lindsay, Donald Trump, Arthur Sulzberger, Joan
Rivers and disk jockey Howard Stern.

Of the 27,000 handgun carry permits in New York City, fewer than 2%
are issued to blacks - who live and work in high-crime areas and
really are in need of protection. 
And what of the origins of the National Rifle Association, which is
wrongly viewed as a racist organization by the black supporters of
gun prohibition? It was inspired and organized by Union Army
officers after the Civil War.
Mr. Innis is national chairman of the New York-based Congress of
Racial Equality.



-- 
bb063@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu  Chris Crobaugh - (216) 327-6655 (V)
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little 
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." B. Franklin
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns