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Editorial Reviews

• Review
  • “America’s gun culture is often thought to be lily white. In this groundbreaking book, Nicholas Johnson shows how African Americans, from the abolitionists to the Deacons for Defense and Justice, have taken up arms time and again to fight for their rights and their lives. You’ll never look at guns and the Second Amendment in the same way again.”
    
    —Adam Winkler, professor of law, UCLA School of Law, author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America
    
    “Race has always been part of the unspoken motive for gun control in the United States. Johnson provides the best, most thorough history of the topic, telling the story mainly from the perspective and voices of blacks themselves. Shattering the myth of black passivity in the face of violent racism, the book is full of inspiring stories of genuine American heroes—some of them famous and many who were not—who used their Second Amendment rights to defend the civil rights of their people. Never shying away from the hardest questions, Johnson addresses the moral and practical complexities of armed self-defense, past and present. A major contribution to cultural studies and to the history of race in America.”
    
    —David B. Kopel, research director, Independence Institute, Denver, Colorado
  About the Author
  Nicholas Johnson (New York, NY) is professor of Law at Fordham Law School, where he has taught since 1993. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he is the lead author of Firearms Law and the Second Amendment: Regulation, Rights and Policy (Aspen 2012).

"In the several years that I have been working on this project, people have asked what motivated it. What did I hope to achieve?

"To the first question, this book, like much of my work, is motivated by a rural sensibility, a familiarity with and affection for people and places that are underacknowledged in both in popular culture and in policy making.

"To the second question, my goal here is to answer a longing that I have observed in a variety of contexts. It is evident when people, especially young people of color, probing the narrative of the civil-rights movement, wonder plaintively whether anyone ever fought back. There is a palpable yearning for something more than the images of Negroes in church clothes flattened by baton charges, attacked by dogs, and sometimes hanged from tree limbs. Many of these people were heroes. But they were also victims, and that leaves us unfulfilled, grateful for their sacrifice but still not fully proud.

"The question lingers, where is our Leonidas? Where is our classic champion who meets force with force even in the face of long odds? Some may find an answer within the black tradition of arms."

MeMelYup wrote:Try "this nonviolent stuff'll get you killed" by Charles E. Cobb Jr. It's his rendition on how guns made the civil rights movement possible.

...great object [of the amendment is to] restrain the power of the states and compel them in all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees....Secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution [including] the right to keep and bear arms.

folksinger wrote:It sounds pretty clear that one of the legislative intents of the amendment was to stop states from infringing the individual right to keep and bear arms.

The Annoyed Man wrote:

MeMelYup wrote:Try "this nonviolent stuff'll get you killed" by Charles E. Cobb Jr. It's his rendition on how guns made the civil rights movement possible.

The bulk of this book so far is exactly that kind of material, going back to colonial days. It is very well researched with lots of references. It seems that the tension between non-violence and self-defense is more than 230 years old. I'm only 15% into the book so far, and right now it's about the immediate post-civil war reconstruction period.

The interesting thing is that when the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution, black firearms ownership was one of the core issues that drove the addition of that amendment. Even back then, when Senator Howard introduced the amendment, he said that the:

...great object [of the amendment is to] restrain the power of the states and compel them in all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees....Secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution [including] the right to keep and bear arms.

Congress even passed a law at the time abolishing the southern state militias because they had been used to disarm the freedmen. This carries the unavoidable implication that it was the intention of Congress that The People be armed.

baldeagle wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote:

MeMelYup wrote:Try "this nonviolent stuff'll get you killed" by Charles E. Cobb Jr. It's his rendition on how guns made the civil rights movement possible.

The bulk of this book so far is exactly that kind of material, going back to colonial days. It is very well researched with lots of references. It seems that the tension between non-violence and self-defense is more than 230 years old. I'm only 15% into the book so far, and right now it's about the immediate post-civil war reconstruction period.

The interesting thing is that when the 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution, black firearms ownership was one of the core issues that drove the addition of that amendment. Even back then, when Senator Howard introduced the amendment, he said that the:

...great object [of the amendment is to] restrain the power of the states and compel them in all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees....Secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution [including] the right to keep and bear arms.

Congress even passed a law at the time abolishing the southern state militias because they had been used to disarm the freedmen. This carries the unavoidable implication that it was the intention of Congress that The People be armed.

Not to mention that it puts the lie to the argument that the 2A was for militias only.

Deltaboy wrote:I remember my Grandfather who said a certain all black town was never messed with cause it was filled with a large group of Spanish American and WW 1 vets who had 30-40 Krags, Lee Endfields and some other surplus stuff from their disbanded National Guard unit. In many cases being unarmed = death.

folksinger wrote: ↑Tue Jun 10, 2014 7:01 pm It sounds pretty clear that one of the legislative intents of the amendment was to stop states from infringing the individual right to keep and bear arms.

Allons wrote: ↑Sun Jul 15, 2018 2:20 pm Ordered on Amazon, will be here tomorrow.