Larry King, the former host of popular CNN show Larry King Live, has weighed in on the growing movement among liberals to go beyond advocacy of “common sense gun laws” to what many on the Left have really favored all along — repeal of the Second Amendment, which protects the right of individual American citizens to keep and bear arms.
King joined former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens in demanding the repeal of the Second Amendment during an interview with TMZ.
What makes King’s position unique (at least so far) is his assertion that the Second Amendment was placed into the Constitution at the behest of “Southern senators so they could ward off slaves uprising.” King added that the Second Amendment was “poorly written,” and that it is no longer relevant for our day and time. “What’d they mean by militia?” King asked TMZ.
Finally, King added, “And the [National Rifle Association] is the worst.” Worst about what exactly, King did not elaborate.
For years, gun-control advocates argued that the Second Amendment was not written to protect the right of individuals to keep and bear arms, but rather simply to protect the right of states to maintain militias. Of course, at the time the Second Amendment was written by James Madison, the common understanding of the militia was basically every able-bodied adult male. Madison even asserted the right of Americans to keep and bear arms as a “natural right” in The Federalist Papers prior to the writing of the Second Amendment.
After the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller that the right to keep and bear arms was, indeed, an individual right protected from infringement by the federal government, then two years later ruled in McDonald v. City of Chicago that the right was also protected from infringement by state and local governments under the Incorporation Doctrine of the Bill of Rights, the Left protested that they were just calling for “common sense gun laws,” not actual gun confiscation from law-abiding citizens.
Now that the mask is off, so to speak, with the publication of Justice Stevens’ call for outright repeal of the Second Amendment in an opinion piece in the New York Times, we can expect others to follow suit.
When TMZ asked King to explain his argument that the Second Amendment was written to meet the demands of “southern senators so they could ward off slaves uprising,” King responded, “Read the history.”
Perhaps King should read some history, and then he would not make such an ill-informed statement. By the time the Second Amendment was adopted in 1791, the right of citizens to keep and bear arms was well-established. After the Boston Tea Party in 1773, the British passed a series of laws known collectively as the “Intolerable Acts” by the colonists. One of the Intolerable Acts turned Massachusetts into a military dictatorship under General Thomas Gage.
Gage did a house-to-house search for weapons in Boston, confiscating hundreds of firearms in what was considered a brazen disregard for the “rights of Englishmen.” When patriots (those who opposed such tyrannical acts by the British) began to stockpile weapons near Boston at Concord, Gage’s spies found out about it. Gage decided he would “nip the rebellion in the bud” by seizing those weapons, too. Instead, Gage’s Redcoats were met on the Village Green in Lexington and at Old North Bridge at Concord by musket-bearing militiamen, where they fired the shots heard ‘round the world — from unregistered guns, no less.
Thus, the American Revolution began over British efforts to violate the right of individual Americans to keep and bear arms. All of this was before there were any senators — northern or southern.
To illustrate just how distorted King’s version of history is, after the Civil War, several southern states passed various laws (the so-called Black Codes) in an attempt to keep the former slaves in an inferior status. Among the more onerous of these laws was one which was designed to prohibit the possession of arms by former slaves. One southern legislator even was explicit in its purpose, explaining it was much easier to control a man who did not have a gun. This led to the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1866, and later, the 14th Amendment, which said that no state could “deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” In other words, since white men were recognized to have a right to keep and bear arms, the same right of black men to keep and bear arms had to be protected by the state, as well.
“Read the history” is a suggestion that King should follow.
Photo: AP Images
