A Flawed Case Against Black Self-Defense.

• Author: Johnson, Nicholas
• Position: BOOKS - Carol Anderson's "The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America"

CAROL ANDERSON CLAIMS the Second Amendment is rooted in the goal of suppressing slave insurrections and therefore is irredeemably racist. Yes, racism has infected other constitutional provisions. But for the Second Amendment, Anderson argues in The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, the affliction is incurable.

"The Second Amendment is so inherently structurally flawed, so based on Black exclusion and debasement, that, unlike the other amendments, it can never be a pathway to civil and human rights for 47.S million African Americans," Anderson writes. She compares the "current-day veneration of the Second Amendment" to "holding the three-fifths clause sacrosanct," arguing that both were "designed to deny African Americans humanity and rights while carrying the aura of constitutional legitimacy."

Reading these claims, I expected a full-frontal attack on the contrary ideas I have developed in my own scholarship. Moving to the endnotes, I was surprised to find my work liberally cited. Anderson and I have worked through much of the same material but reached dramatically different conclusions about the utility, legitimacy, and importance of the right to arms in general and for black folk in particular.

ANDERSON, CHAIR OF African American Studies at Emory University, presents the Second Amendment as a proxy for the much more textured American right to arms. This approach allows her to focus on a narrow slice of the federal constitution's story. She ignores the lessons from the American Revolution, including British attempts to disarm colonists as the rebellion came to a boil. Those conflicts provided plenty of reasons for the framing generation to think about and advocate a robust private right to arms, separate from concerns about slavery.

The Second also does not acknowledge the right-to-arms story in the places where most government action on guns has always occurred: the states, which unlike the federal government have broad police powers. The first federal gun control law did not appear until the 1920s. Gun regulation prior to that point was a function of state and local law.

The Second does not address the independent protections of the right to arms established in 44 of 50 state constitutions. Anderson expurgates the history of the federal right in order to damn the Second Amendment as rooted in slave control. But the broader right to arms enshrined in the state constitutions contradicts that portrayal.

Many of the state...