The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America

by Carol Anderson

As the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights reported in its study of the racial implications of the law, the criminal justice system is “ten times more likely” to rule a homicide justifiable “if the shooter is white and the victim black” than if an African American kills someone white and claims self-defense.

From colonial times through the twenty-first century, regardless of the laws, regardless of the court decisions, regardless of the changing political environment, the Second has consistently meant this: The second a Black person exercises that right, the second they pick up a gun to protect themselves (or not), their life—as surely as Philando Castile’s, as surely as Alton Sterling’s, as surely as twelve-year-old Tamir Rice’s—could be snatched away in that same fatal second.

While the wealthy rice plantation owners who dominated South Carolina’s government refused all entreaties and pleas from Congress to fully join in this fight for the United States, the patriotic press, needing to still hold the northern and southern colonies together in this war, laid the blame for the debacle in Charleston and Savannah at the feet of the enslaved.

white rage.

Eyyy

As late as 1857 in Oregon, a lopsided 8,640–1,041 election banned Blacks from settling in the territory, which was codified in the state’s 1859 constitution and not repealed until 1926.

Virginia and Florida would craft legislation that used the criminal justice system to convict free Blacks of some trumped-up charge and then sell them into “their true condition … absolute slavery.”

This legislative ennui about musket- and rifle-toting insurgents also ignored that, from Shays’s Rebellion to the Whiskey Rebellion, white men were the ones who had taken up arms against the United States of America. And in a pattern that would repeat itself well into the twenty-first century, there were little to no consequences for that.

Founded in 1871 by ex-Union soldiers to promote marksmanship, the NRA had “enjoyed a ‘mom and apple pie’ reputation for nearly a century.” It had been, in many ways, an apolitical organization. That changed in the 1960s “when the NRA believed that individual gun rights were in jeopardy … [and] formally engaged in the political process.”

Many white Americans couldn’t get over their first impression of the Black Panthers. Coverage of the 1967 protest introduced them to the party, and the fear of black people exercising their rights in an empowered, intimidating fashion left its mark. To them the Black Panthers were little more than a group of thugs unified behind militaristic trappings and a leftist political ideology.

by 1966, “85 percent of whites were certain that ‘the pace of civil rights was too fast.’ ”

“While the murder rate in the United States fell by 20% from 1990-1998, the numbers of stories about murder (excluding O.J. Simpson) on the network news increased by 600 percent.”

The Tampa Bay Times conducted an investigation and found that since stand your ground had been enacted in Florida, “nearly seventy percent of those who invoked it as a defense had gone free.” Moreover, “there was a racial imbalance: a person was more likely to be found innocent if the victim was black.”

“It’s impossible to be unarmed when your Blackness is the weapon that they fear.”

Rittenhouse was a minor who was illegally carrying the AR-15 in an open carry state, and he had killed two men and wounded another. Yet as the police, media, and elected officials made clear, Rittenhouse still had Second Amendment rights not available to Tamir Rice, who had been sitting alone in a pavilion with a toy gun.

the current-day veneration of the Second Amendment, driven by the lobbying and publicity campaign of the NRA, is, frankly, akin to holding the three-fifths clause sacrosanct.