Blacks and Gun Control
A new video to be used as part of an ad campaign depicts graphic scenes of a black man being dragged from his home and hanged from a tree by white men in hooded gowns with a burning cross as a backdrop – a reminder, producers say, of laws that once banned African-Americans from owning firearms. -
(See more at: http://cnsnews.com/ news/article/never-again-campaign-launched-gun-control-has-historic-roots-disarming-blacks-lynchings#sthash.wA9fX1lR.dpuf)
Mississippi Black Code, 1865 – “No freedman, Negro, or mulatto shall carry or keep firearms or ammunition”
The 19th Century Supreme Court case known as the Dred Scott decision (Scott v. Sandford, 1857) is a good example of how the Supreme Court can be dead wrong.
Dred Scott was a slave living in a free state. The Supreme Court was asked to decide whether a free black was a citizen, entitled to the full protection of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and other laws of the United States. The Supreme Court held that because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue for his freedom. That same decision also declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820, legislation which restricted slavery in certain territories, unconstitutional.
"[If black people were] entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of the special laws and from the police regulations which [Southern states] considered to be necessary for their own safety. It would give the persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union...the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and 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, inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State."
The "special laws" mentioned by the court are the Black Codes, drafted to keep blacks down even if they became free. Essential to the Black Code of every Southern state was a law prohibiting blacks from owning firearms - a total gun ban for blacks only.
The best way to keep any group of people down is to prevent them from defending themselves.
And remember this case, too, the next time someone makes the brainless argument that a law is constitutional just because five lawyers in black robes say it is.