Anti-Gunner Offers Cartoonish Version of U.S. History to Demand Civilian Disarmament
At one of the two No Kings protests held in Richmond, Virginia this past weekend, one of the speakers urged attendees to go out and buy a gun and exercise their Second Amendment rights. There was no call to violence in his statement, just a call to arms.
I’m not sure how well that comment went over with those in attendance, but I’m pretty sure that if California writer Matt Stone had been in the audience he would have turned tomato-faced with rage. In a diatribe for the Davis Vanguard, Stone has taken aim at “the gun,’ which, in his mind, has primarily (and perhaps only) been a tool of oppression for hundreds of years.
To understand the American obsession with firearms, you have to strip away the nostalgia and look at the ledger. The gun was the specific technology required to seize a continent and build an economy. It was the instrument that turned “uninhabited” land into private property and human beings into chattel.
The Second Amendment was not drafted in a vacuum of philosophical abstraction. It was drafted to protect the state militias, whose primary function, explicitly cited in the text, was to execute the “Law of the Union” and suppress “Insurrections.” In the language of the time, that meant one thing: killing Native Americans to clear the land and terrorizing enslaved Africans to keep the labor force in check.
I could devote this entire post to debunking just this paragraph, but I’ll settle for the Cliff’s Notes version since there’s so much more stupidity to cover. Chattel slavery existed long before the musket ever came into existence, and the African slavers who were the source of the millions of souls trapped in bondage weren’t dependent on firearms.
The Second Amendment was drafted, in part, to ensure that militias, which were comprised of every able-bodied male from young adulthood to old age, would not be destroyed by an act of Congress, but it was also meant to ensure that the people’s right to keep and bear arms outside of those militia purposes would not be infringed. Stone is simply off his rocker when he claims that “insurrections” only meant targeting Native Americans and “terrorizing” slaves. Even if Stone had referred to putting down slave revolts (which did fall under “insurrections”), it’s just flat out false to say those were the only “insurrections” in the colonies where the militia was used to stop the disorder.






