Damon W. Root: Civil Rights and Armed Self-Defense
[Damon W. Root is an associate editor at Reason magazine.]
...In his concurring opinion last month in the landmark gun rights case McDonald v. Chicago, [Clarence] Thomas held that the right to keep and bear arms is fully applicable against state and local governments via the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment. In the process, Thomas provided a sweeping history of the 14th Amendment’s roots in the anti-slavery movement and its original purpose as a shield against the predatory actions of the former Confederate states, who sought to deny the civil, political, and economic rights of black Americans and their white allies—including the right to keep and bear arms.
...Thomas’ concurrence in McDonald draws from a long and uninterrupted line of civil rights activists who preached the virtues of armed self-defense. The great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, for instance, who famously urged President Abraham Lincoln to arm the liberated slaves against their former masters, was an outspoken champion of gun rights in the decades after the Civil War. American liberty depends upon “the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box,” Douglass wrote in his third and final autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). Without these privileges and immunities of citizenship, “no class of people could live and flourish in this country.” Blacks therefore required all three....
Read entire article at Reason
...In his concurring opinion last month in the landmark gun rights case McDonald v. Chicago, [Clarence] Thomas held that the right to keep and bear arms is fully applicable against state and local governments via the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment. In the process, Thomas provided a sweeping history of the 14th Amendment’s roots in the anti-slavery movement and its original purpose as a shield against the predatory actions of the former Confederate states, who sought to deny the civil, political, and economic rights of black Americans and their white allies—including the right to keep and bear arms.
...Thomas’ concurrence in McDonald draws from a long and uninterrupted line of civil rights activists who preached the virtues of armed self-defense. The great abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, for instance, who famously urged President Abraham Lincoln to arm the liberated slaves against their former masters, was an outspoken champion of gun rights in the decades after the Civil War. American liberty depends upon “the ballot-box, the jury-box, and the cartridge-box,” Douglass wrote in his third and final autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). Without these privileges and immunities of citizenship, “no class of people could live and flourish in this country.” Blacks therefore required all three....