Scared People Want Their Guns

[Remember this blog's original tagline, "gut reactions, hunches, jokes, and wild speculations."] 

The 2002 Academy-award winning documentary feature Bowling for Columbine posits that fear, particularly, negrophobia, is the reason for gun proliferation in the United States, and this is essentially correct. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1865 and the NRA was founded in 1871, though this is purely coincidence. But it goes back earlier than this.

Southern slave owners feared slave uprisings such as the Stono Rebellion. So they formed militias, or slave patrols. Hence, we got the second amendment in 1791:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed

To understand the history behind this read Roger Williams University School of Law Professor of Law Carl T. Bogus's The Hidden History of the Second Amendment, or at least watch this summary and interview. Professor Bogus argues that:

James Madison wrote the second amendment in significant part to assure his constituents in Virginia and the South generally that the federal government could not use its new Constitutional powers over the militia, which had previously been controlled by the states, to indirectly subvert the slave system in the South by disarming the militia.

History bears out that militia debate was prominent when Congress was ratifying the Bill or Rights in 1789. The "New Originalist" Roberts' Court (District of Columbia v. Heller) was the first Supreme Court case to set the precedent that the second amendment applies to individual gun ownership. Truly pro-life lawmakers should put aside fear and pseudo-strict constitutionalism in order to protect human life.