From: "Clayton E. Cramer" <clayton_cramer@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: boulder.general,misc.legal,talk.politics.guns,co.general
Subject: Re: 2nd Amendment NOT a personal right
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1998 12:34:44 -0700

Scout wrote:

> Clayton E. Cramer <clayton_cramer@hotmail.com> wrote in article
> <35BF7CA0.2715E158@hotmail.com>...
> > Franklin Jennings wrote:
> >
> > > In consideration of Lincoln's plans for reconstruction vs. Radical
> > > Republicanism, it was a great disservice.  Thank God there are still
> > > unreconstructed southerners.
>
> > Really?  Slavery has been abolished.
>
> Excuse me, but slavery has not been abolished, it's simply been limited as
> a punishment for a conviction by due process. Check out the Amendment if
> you don't believe me.

I hate to disappoint you, but while a person might indeed be enslaved for a
violation of law in the U.S., we don't do it.  People are sent to
prison, sometimes for life, but they aren't slaves.  Slaves can be sold;
slaves were often beaten to death (nominally illegal, but seldom seriously
punished); slaves could be raped.  (Oh excuse me: Mississippi, showing
how advanced it was, finally made it illegal in 1859 for masters to rape
slaves -- under 12.  They were the ONLY slave state to pass even that
restriction.)

> >Laws forbidding blacks from owning guns have
> > gone away.
>
> Actually, many of them have not, they have simply been expanded to include
> more than just the blacks. Interesting that the roots of gun control in
> this nation has it's roots in preventing self defense against oppression.

See my web page for the content of my Kansas Journal of Law & PublicPolicy
article "The Racist Roots of Gun Control."  But expanding such
laws has created common ground to end such discriminatory laws.
Why do you think discretionary CCW issuance is going away, state by
state?

> >  Interracial marriage is now lawful.
>
> Hmmm. Could you please point out those laws which made interracial
> marriages illegal?

Oh come now.  Virginia's law on the subject was struck down in Loving v.
Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).  California had a similar
measure into the late 1940s.

> >  Those "unreconstructed southerners"
> > must be very upset.
>
> Well depends on which particular "unreconstructed southerners you are
> talking about" if you mean groups like the KKK that think that they are
> somehow superior simply because of their race then I hope they are upset.
> If however you mean those that decided that federal control was beginning
> to take control of very aspects of their life, with the states have little
> freedom to resist, then yea, those folks are probably upset too, but not
> about this.

Do you really want to defend laws that made it illegal for a couple tomarry
because they were of different races?