PA Bill Number: HB829
Title: In preliminary provisions, further providing for definitions;
Description: An Act amending the act of April 12, 1951 (P.L.90, No.21), known as the Liquor Code, in preliminary provisions, further providing for definitions;
Last Action: Signed in House
Last Action Date: Jul 3, 2024
Halbrook Shoots Down Bogus Claim about the Second Amendment :: 07/13/2018
The Second Amendment has been under fire for several decades. Although the Supreme Court has recently shored up the amendment’s status as an individual right against government prohibition—most famously in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010)—the Constitution’s “right to keep and bear arms” still faces hostility from the intelligentsia. In a recent op-ed at FoxNews.com, Independent Institute Senior Fellow Stephen P. Halbrook, author of several books on the history of gun rights and restrictions, slays the claim that the Second Amendment was created to protect slavery.
The claim, spelled out twenty years ago by Prof. Carl T. Bogus (!) in the U.C. Davis Law Review and repeated last May in a New York Times op-ed, ignores mountains of evidence. Long before the Constitutional Convention, the American colonists saw themselves as enjoying the same rights as other Englishmen, who possessed the right to “have arms for their Defense” as expressed in the English Declaration of Rights of 1689. During ratification, discussion of the Second Amendment centered on self-defense against tyranny and invasion, not slavery. After the Civil War, Congress adopted the Fourteenth Amendment largely to prevent state governments from denying freed slaves the right to keep and bear arms.
“The Second Amendment has nothing to do with slavery; it never did,” Halbrook writes. “The historical injustice is that even after the Constitution’s ratification, African-Americans were denied fundamental rights that others enjoyed, including the right to arm themselves to protect their lives and liberties.” This fits a recurring pattern: Tyranny and oppression often come because the oppressed have been disarmed, their individual right to armed self-defense deemed non-existent. Halbrook has shown that this was a central concern to America’s Founders, to authors of the antebellum amendments, and to Nazi oppressors in the run-up to World War II. Americans forget this history at their peril.
The Second Amendment Had Nothing to Do with Slavery, by Stephen P. Halbrook (FoxNews.com, 6/22/18)
Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance, by Stephen P. Halbrook
Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State”, by Stephen P. Halbrook
The Founders’ Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms, by Stephen P. Halbrook
Securing Civil Rights: Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Right to Bear Arms, by Stephen P. Halbrook
http://www.independent.org/publications/the_lighthouse/detail.asp?id=3768#1
