Dred Scott and the right to bear arms

[Quantum Windbag]

Interesting that one of the arguments used to support the Dred Scott decision was that all citizens of the United States have the right to actually carry arms wherever they want. That was a 7-2 decision that effectively denied blacks the right to self defense.

Interestingly enough, gun control disproportionately affects blacks over whites. That would mean that liberals, if they were intellectually honest and consistent, would oppose gun control laws because they are racist.

t cannot be believed that the large slaveholding States regarded them as included in the word citizens, or would have consented to a Constitution which might compel them to receive them in that character from another State. For if they were so received, and entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of the special laws and from the police regulations which they considered to be necessary for their own safety. It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.

It is impossible, it would seem, to believe that the great men of the slaveholding States, who took so large a share in framing the Constitution of the United States and exercised so much influence in procuring its adoption, could have been so forgetful or regardless of their own safety and the safety of those who trusted and confided in them.

Scott v. Sandford - 60 U.S. 393 (1856) :: Justia US Supreme Court Center