The Second Amendment Enshrines Anti-Blackness, Argues Writer and Legal Scholar Carol Anderson

It reads like a hit list. Highland Park. Uvalde. Buffalo. El Paso. Tree of Life Synagogue. Sandy Hook. Parkland. Pulse Nightclub. Virginia Tech. Charleston. Two hundred and four people dead. They were simply celebrating the Fourth of July, going to school, grocery shopping, dancing, praying.

But despite this senseless carnage, we have created the fiction that our safety and security requires widespread access to guns. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision, which struck down New York’s gun registration law, amplifies this quixotic quest for armed individual “self-defense” while denigrating the state’s efforts to provide peace of mind in a city packed with nearly 8.5 million people. Similarly, in 2022, Georgia governor Brian Kemp signed a bill that allows permitless carry, which is the ability to have a gun without a license. He said the new law “makes sure that law-abiding Georgians, including our daughters and your family, too, can protect themselves without having to have permission from your state government.” Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly, in the wake of the slaughter in Las Vegas, where 59 people were shot to death, wrote, “The Second Amendment is clear that Americans have a right to arm themselves for protection.” It is, he added, “the price of freedom.” Texas governor Greg Abbott, after signing a bill in 2021 that allows for gun ownership without any training or permits, said, “Texas must become a “Second Amendment sanctuary state.… We need to erect a complete barrier against any government official anywhere from treading on gun rights in Texas.”

The soaring language of “freedom,” “Second Amendment rights,” “defend,” and “protect” hides a nasty, brutal, dark history. It is the kind of history that infects our present and helps explain why we failed to act after Columbine. After Sandy Hook. After El Paso. And why we have failed, even with the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (2022), to deal with the deadly issue of access to military-grade weaponry after Uvalde and Buffalo.

To understand this nation’s obsession with guns and the so-called safety they represent, despite numerous mass shootings and more than 45,000 killed annually by gun violence, is to understand the nation’s obsession with anti-Blackness and how it prevents gun safety laws from gaining any real traction.

Not surprisingly, the issue is rooted in slavery. The white settlers’ fear of the enslaved, the need to cast the African-descended as inherently brutal, violent, and criminal, and, thus, a threat to the white community, led to legal and societal norms steeped in anti-Blackness. During the colonial era, an increasingly restrictive legal domain banned the enslaved from owning guns or ammo and included free Blacks in that prohibition while mandating that white men be armed at all times. Even in church. In other words, Black people were a never-ending threat that could only be contained by violence, guns, and armed white men in the militia. This twisted formulation embedded itself in the Constitution’s Second Amendment.

After the War for Independence and the need to scrap the unworkable Articles of Confederation and devise the Constitution, the question about the role of the militia gained prominence, especially during the ratification conventions in the states. James Madison, the architect of the Constitution, had placed control of the militia under Congress because of how unreliable those forces had been during the war against the British and the need to get them organized under federal oversight. Anti-federalist enslavers in Virginia, Patrick Henry and George Mason, balked; while the militia may have been unreliable during the war, those troops had a rock-solid, century-long reputation for quelling slave revolts.

During the debates in Virginia over ratification of the Constitution, Henry and Mason made clear that the federal government, with states like Massachusetts and Pennsylvania that were abolishing slavery within their borders, could not be trusted to send in the militia to protect Virginia plantation owners during a slave uprising. These founding fathers feared being left “defenseless” against the anger, violence, and retribution of Black people. Mason and Henry, therefore, threatened to scuttle ratification of the Constitution, and when that didn’t quite work, vowed to call a new Constitutional Convention if they failed to get the protection that the white community demanded.

Madison understood his mission, and during the First Congress crafted a Bill of Rights, as if he were “constantly haunted by the ghost of Patrick Henry,” that acknowledged, among a slew of individual rights, the needs of the enslavers: “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.” As historian Heather Cox Richardson has made clear, the Second Amendment was about the militia, not some phantom individual right to bear arms.

The U.S. Congress followed up with the 1790 Naturalization Act, which defined white people as the only immigrants worthy of American citizenship. The next important law was the 1792 Uniform Militia Act, that required every white male between ages 18 and 45 own a gun and join the militia.

The gun-toting white militia was the weapon to handle the ongoing “threat” of Black people. The African descendants were, as one Virginian noted, a “ferocious monster” who must be kept “in chains.” In Louisiana, the state legislature considered Black people “the enemy.” This conception of African Americans as dangerous, as criminal, as violent, as a threat to white people would transcend slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and the elections of Barack Obama and Kamala Harris.

That sense of danger not only killed Trayvon Martin, Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, Amir Locke, and Jayland Walker, it also led, for example, to the glorification of Mark and Patricia McCloskey in St. Louis, who stepped out on their lawn to pull weapons on peaceful Black Lives Matter (BLM) protestors. This construction of Black people as the danger in American society was apparent when officers in Washington, D.C., were “firing stun grenades, setting off smoke bombs, shoving demonstrators with batons and shields,” and plotting to use a heat ray to make BLM marchers feel like “their skin is on fire.”

Note, though, that sense of danger and ramping up of violence did not accompany the arrest of Dylan Roof, who murdered nine people during Bible study. Similarly, police took Payton Gendron alive after his racist screed led to Gendron killing 10 Black people at a grocery store in Buffalo. There’s also James Holmes, who was arrested in the parking lot in Aurora, Colorado, after shooting 12 people dead and wounding 70 others in a movie theater. Officers were able to track down and arrest Robert Crimo III, who had propped himself on a roof and used paradegoers in Highland Park as human targets, killing six and wounding at least two dozen more. And, despite all of the warnings flowing into various law enforcement agencies, the virtually all-white mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6^th did not raise alarms enough to warrant the array of force that was applied against the BLM just a few months earlier.

No, in America, Black people are the dangerous ones. Research by Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt shows how the biological fear mechanism goes into high alert when even a picture of an African American with a probable weapon is presented. Reinforcing that framing of Black danger is a study by Vanderbilt psychiatrist and sociologist Jonathan Metzl in which white people in rural Missouri who had suffered gun violence in the family were adamantly opposed to gun safety regulations, believing firearms were all that protected them from St. Louis–area Blacks descending on rural Missouri and taking everything of value.

When white life is perceived as being so precariously perched, it's paranoia that reigns. If the belief is that danger lurks everywhere in a rapidly diversifying America, even the horrors of Uvalde, Parkland, Sandy Hook, and Columbine don't seem as scary as enacting gun control legislation. Indeed, after Uvalde, when criticism rained down on Texas about the ease with which the killer obtained two AR-15s, Governor Abbott countered by raising the specter of Chicago as a place apparently so violent that strict gun control laws were absolutely useless. The implication is clear.

We are, therefore, dealing with the consequences and horrific costs of embedding anti-Blackness into the Second Amendment of the Constitution. No one is safe. Not in our schools. Not in our neighborhood grocery stores. Not in our churches or synagogues or mosques. Not where we work. Not where we go to relax—at a nightclub, a concert, or a movie theater. Not even where we celebrate the founding of this nation.

With 400 million guns in circulation, and no safety to be found, it is time to strip away the untouchable aura of the Second Amendment and recognize how sullied and dangerous it really is. America needs to give the Second Amendment a hard second look.

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African American studies at Emory University and the author of The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America (Bloomsbury, 2021).

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