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Court Tackles Guns
Rights

Leonard E. Colvin
Chief Reporter
New Journal & Guide 
 
       Recently the U. S. Supreme  for  the first time in eight decades took up  the issue of the rights of citizens to own and possess handguns
       Lawyers stood before the high court to make their pleas for and against the case of  District of Columbia vs. Heller, which challenges the banning of handguns in Washington, D.C.
       The heart of the arguments before the nine-member court is whether the banning of handgun ownership in the nation’s capital breaches residents’ constitutional rights under the Second Amendment.
Proponents of overturning the ban say the  Second Amendment allows citizens to own and bear weapons as a  “personal” and individual right.

       The opposing view, and the one that anti-gun rights advocates have been using as the bulwark of their argument, says the Second Amendment called for the “collective”  rights model based on the idea that it only called for the arming of a citizen militia to protect the nation from enemies—foreign and domestic.
       The issue of  banning guns varies across the nation.  In urban communities such as New York and the nation’s capital where  handgun deaths  are counted in the hundreds in a year, prohibition of  handguns has been justified to curb violent crime.
       But banning guns does not mean they cannot be obtained. In Washington, D.C., for example,  handguns can be easily obtained by  walking into an outlet in any of the surrounding cities in Virginia that ring the District.

       Virginia has one of the most relaxed handgun ownership laws in the nation, as do most southern states based on the “personal” right to buy and own a handgun.  In fact, with a proper permit, one can carry a concealed weapon.  In  Virginia and in many western states, civilians can walk around with their weapons strapped to their waist.
       But while opponents and proponents of handguns wrangle over their interpretation of the amendment,  the original intent of the Founding Fathers may have been based in the protection of Whites against slave rebellions more than assaults from the British, according to a Professor of Law at Roger Williams University.

Posted April 9, 2008

Attorney Carl. T. Bogus says the Second Amendment was designed not to defend the new nation against foreign enemies or to allow personal ownership of a weapon, as has been popularly interpreted.
     “Especially in the eastern portion of Virginia and in South Carolina, slaves were in the majority,” he said.  “By 1791, some 250 slave revolts had occurred and many Whites had been killed or maimed.  The militias were  more important as a means to protect Whites against such violence, not as a citizen Army to fight the British.”
      Bogus said Virginia and North Carolina  established “slave patrols” to ensure that Blacks were not congregating,  wandering or engaged in other threatening behavior. These states required white men and women to participate in the patrols and provide their own weapons. By the mid-18th century the patrols  became the responsibility of the state militias which became synonymous with patrols. Slave patrols-militia were under command of state military officers.
       In fact, many southern states did not want to send their militias or weapons to help in the fight against the British, fearing such an absence would make their white population vulnerable to slave revolts.  Bogus said that  despite successes at Bunker Hill and Lexington during the early days of the American Revolution, militias were poorly organized,  undisciplined, prone to desertion in droves during battle, plagued with drunks, and could not defend the nation.
       Recent books written about the debates  and the process of constructing the U.S. Constitution and its Bill of Rights, in the late 1880s, reveal that slavery, as an issue, took up a great deal of time among the delegates at the beginning of the National Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

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