By Frances Rice
Photo: Otis McDonald a plaintiff in the McDonald v. City of Chicago case
How ironic that, on the day Democrat Senator Robert Byrd who was a recruiter
for the Ku Klux Klan and rose to the title of Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops of
his local chapter died, the US Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the gun
control laws that are embedded firmly in the Democratic Party's racist
roots.
At the heart of the McDonald v. City of Chicago case that is posted on the US Supreme Court's Internet site is the Court's decision that the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution - that was pushed through by Republicans after the Civil War, led by Republican Senator Charles Sumner - is the anchor that binds state and local governments to the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms for self defense.
Otis McDonald, one of the plaintiffs, is a black man who just wanted to have the right to protect himself from criminals who terrorized him in his home with frequent break-ins. The only current black US Supreme Court member, Justice Clarence Thomas who was appointed by Republican President George H. W. Bush, courageously delved into the racist origins of gun control laws to demonstrate that such laws have no place in a nation of free people. The liberal justices on the Court, including Justice Sonia Sotomayor who was appointed last year by Democrat President Barack Obama, voted against the black plaintiff and his fellow Chicago residents.
The McDonald case provides a bird eye's view of the history of Democratic Party racism. Referenced in the Court's opinion is the 1856 Republican Party Platform that includes language about the "right of the people to keep and bear arms." A key source used by the Court is the book "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877" by Dr. Eric Foner.
Forner's book reveals how, before the Civil War ended, Southern states enacted "Slave Codes" that prohibited slaves from owning firearms. After Republican President Abraham Lincoln issued the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves in the rebelling states, and after Republicans pushed through the Thirteenth Amendment freeing all the remaining slaves, Democrats in the South persisted in keeping the newly freed slaves from owning the means to protect themselves - guns.
The Supreme Court in the McDonald decision wrote also about how, after the Civil War, the Southern States started passing laws, called "Black Codes", to systematically disarm blacks, specifically the over 180,000 blacks who returned to the states of the old Confederacy after serving in the Union Army. In response to the "Black Codes," the Republican-controlled Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866. But the Democrats would not be deterred. Very soon after the 1866 law was enacted, Alabama, followed by other Southern states, again passed "Black Codes" that made it illegal for blacks to own firearms.
Cited by the Court in the McDonald case, as an example of such a discriminatory code, is the Mississippi law that stated: "no freedman, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her county, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife." In one Southern town, according to the Supreme Court, the marshal confiscated the weapons of the returning black Union soldiers and, at every opportunity, promptly shot black people.
The Court's McDonald decision records that: "Throughout the South, armed parties, often consisting of ex-Confederate soldiers serving in the state militias, forcibly took firearms from newly freed slaves". In his book about Reconstruction, Dr. Foner revealed that in 1866, the Ku Klux Klan was started as a Tennessee social club. The Klan then became a military force serving the interests of the Democratic Party and spread into other Southern states, launching a "reign of terror" against Republican leaders, black and white. The Klan would "order the colored men to give up their arms; saying that everybody would be Kukluxed in whose house fire-arms were found".
In the McDonald decision, the Court pointed out how the Republican-controlled Congress, while debating the Fourteenth Amendment, referred to the right to keep and bear arms as a fundamental right deserving of protection.
Republican
Senator Samuel Pomeroy described three "indispensable"
"safeguards of liberty under our form of Government", one of which
was the right to keep and bear arms. Pomeroy said: "Every man . . . should
have the right to bear arms for the defense of himself and family and his
homestead. And if the cabin door of the freedman is broken open and the
intruder enters for purposes as vile as were known to slavery, then should a
well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the polluted wretch
to another world, where his wretchedness will forever remain
complete".
Pomeroy's words reflect exactly the sentiment expressed by Otis McDonald when he and his fellow Chicagoans filed a law suit against the Democrat-controlled City of Chicago that had confiscated their weapons, leaving them to the mercy of intruders who had broken open his door and entered his home for vile purposes.
Frances Rice, a retired lawyer and Army Lieutenant Colonel, is chairman of the National Black Republican Association and may be contacted at: www.NBRA.Info
Pomeroy's words reflect exactly the sentiment expressed by Otis McDonald when he and his fellow Chicagoans filed a law suit against the Democrat-controlled City of Chicago that had confiscated their weapons, leaving them to the mercy of intruders who had broken open his door and entered his home for vile purposes.
Frances Rice, a retired lawyer and Army Lieutenant Colonel, is chairman of the National Black Republican Association and may be contacted at: www.NBRA.Info
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RELATED ARTICLES
No, the United States Doesn’t Lead the World
in Mass Shootings
BY MATT MARGOLIS |
PJ Media
A playground near the baseball field is
cordoned off with police tape as the investigation continue at the scene in
Alexandria, Va., Thursday, June 15, 2017, the day after House Majority Whip
Steve Scalise of La. was shot during a congressional baseball practice. (AP
Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
As expected, Democrats immediately began politicizing the
shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. Quite a few of them even
blamed Trump. Like clockwork, calls for more gun control have commenced.
Democrats are even trying to pressure Mitch McConnell to cancel the Senate recess so they can vote on gun control.
A common myth you can expect to hear a lot in the coming
days and weeks is that the United States “leads the world in mass shootings” and therefore we must
pass some law that will do nothing to stop future mass shootings, but will
infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners.
What you might not hear is that this claim is completely bogus.
Sure, if you following conservative media, you’re
probably aware of this. Townhall, The Daily Signal, Bearing Arms, FEE, The Washington Examiner, and others have all
previously reported on how the myth that the United States leads the world in
mass shootings is based on a deeply flawed study, which has been debunked by the Crime Prevention Research
Center.
Yet, the myth remains alive and is sure to be
regurgitated endlessly again.
The following video from John Stossel explains how the
myth got started and why it's bogus:
Many on the left have tried to delegitimize CPRC’s
research. Snopes rated their claim as “mixed” but CPRC debunked their assessment here. Glenn Kessler, the
fact-checker at The Washington Post, also suggests that
CPRC’s research is misleading for including acts terrorism, which, he
suggests, inflates the number of mass shooters abroad, however, if we excluded
acts of terrorism from mass shootings, the El Paso shooting would not count as
a mass shooting, as it is now being investigated as domestic terrorism. The Orlando Pulse Nightclub shooting, and the Las Vegas shooting were also considered domestic
terrorism incidents. If those, and other similar incidents, don’t count as mass
shootings but as terrorism, then we should be having a completely different
discussion.
In the end, the problem of mass shootings (and gun
violence in general) is not one to be solved by knee jerk reactions,
finger-pointing, useless legislation or unconstitutional gun grabs. The left
will do whatever they can to politicize these incidents because they think they
can gain power from it. They don’t expect most Americans to do the research
required to fully understand the big picture.
Matt Margolis is the author of Trumping Obama: How President
Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama's Legacy and the bestselling
book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama.
You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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Vox Confirms That, Yes, They Do Want to Take
Our Guns
BY STEPHEN KRUISER |
PJ Media
A policeman searches a small handbag of a
young lady during a large police search for guns and other weapons, in Berlin,
March 28, 1933. (AP Photo)
The brutal news about the mass shootings over the weekend
has once again left social media and the blogosphere flooded with thousands of
ignorant hot takes offering solutions that won't solve anything.
Predictably, the Democrats running for president have
been some
of the worst offenders. As expected, they're all full of cries for
congressional action, however vague. The tragedies have highlighted just how
little difference there is between them.
I try to avoid social media in times of tragedy but I
allowed myself to be lured in today and made a couple of quick observations,
this one coming after seeing three or four elected Democrats blame Mitch
McConnel for America's societal woes:
I will say this: none of
the top-down, increased federal intervention solutions to society's ills are
worth a damn. They're all about a lust for power & further entrenching a bureaucracy
that keeps them rolling in $$$.
-----
The progressive brain trust over at Vox.com posted a rather long article that was one of
the more honest leftist anti-gun pieces I've read in a while and illustrates
precisely why law-abiding gun owners are so distrustful of the anti-Second
Amendment crowd.
The post admits early on that Congress doesn't have a
magic wand it can wave an make it all go away:
But let's be clear about precisely what kind of
decision is letting events like this recur, most recently in Dayton and El Paso. Congress's decision not to pass background checks
is not what's keeping the US from European gun violence levels. The expiration
of the assault weapons ban is not behind the gap.
What's behind the gap, plenty
of research indicates, is that Americans have more guns.
Once getting to the obvious, the article moves on to the
thing we normal gun owners have been called paranoid for believing all these
years:
Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of
getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge
number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.
It's the main points of those paragraphs that always
bring me to my main problems with the Democrats' lust for "sweeping gun
legislation" in whatever form they propose.
The first is the number of guns issue. We have always had
a lot of guns here in the United States. The proximity/availability argument
from the left has always been weak to me, especially as I'm an Arizonan. I grew
up around guns. Heck, my liberal friends are all gun owners here. If there were
a logical thread that could be run through the availability argument then we
should be under siege here.
The tragic mass shooting we had in Tucson years ago was
done by a lunatic who had been on local law enforcement's radar for years and
nothing was done about him.
Of all of the worn-out lines from either side, one remains
true: most proposed legislative "fixes" to gun violence largely end
up just punishing people who obey the law.
My reward for having done everything right is to be left
more vulnerable to attack from those who don't?
As arguments go, that one moves me not at all.
There are plenty of deep conversations that should be had
about the recent mass shootings in America, all involving ideas that can't be
zipped up in a convenient social media rallying point.
Nobody's got time for that though.
At least the leftists have gotten to the point in this
"debate" where they have — unwittingly or not — admitted that they've
indeed been lying about wanting to take our guns.