Chicago versus the Second Amendment (OpEd)

Stephen P. Halbrook: Chicago versus the Second Amendment
the Washington Examiner
By: Stephen P. Halbrook
OpEd Contributor
February 27, 2010




On March 2, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether Chicago
must respect the Second Amendment “right of the people to keep and bear arms.”

Mayor Richard M. Daley argues that it does not apply there,
and that in “an urban landscape, the Second Amendment becomes
the enemy of ordered liberty, not its guarantor.”

Ignoring those citizens who may need guns to protect their families
in their own homes, Daley conjures a parade of horrors,
such as “criminal street gangs with the right to carry guns” using
violence “to control the drug trade.”

The Bill of Rights was originally intended to prevent a tyranny
by the federal government. But when the Civil War ended slavery,
the Southern states passed the Black Codes, which deprived
African Americans of basic rights " including gun ownership.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution was adopted in 1868
to prevent states and localities from violating these rights.

Today, Chicago has its own equivalent of the Black Codes, which
it argues is constitutional because everyone is equally deprived of rights.
In Chicagospeak, an 1866 petition of freed slaves complaining
that South Carolina prohibited them from possessing firearms
only sought “an equality requirement.”

But in Congress, Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner said they
should be protected “in keeping arms” and “in complete liberty of speech” "
not that they could be equally deprived of these rights.

That same year, Congress passed legislation protecting the
“full and equal benefit” of laws for “personal liberty”
and “personal security,” “including the constitutional right to bear arms.”
“Full,” not just “equal.”

Introducing the 14th Amendment in Congress, Senator Jacob M. Howard of Michigan
referred to “personal rights” like “the right to keep and bear arms,”
explaining that the amendment would compel the states
“to respect these great fundamental guarantees.”

Without these rights, “a people cannot exist except as slaves,
subject to a despotism,” Howard argued. Chicago says this was
just Howard’s personal view, even though no one in Congress
disputed it and the speech was published on the front page of the New York Times.

Guess who Chicago relies on? The racist opponents of the
Fourteenth Amendment. One was Senator Thomas A. Hendricks
of Indiana, later President Grover Cleveland’s vice president,
who objected to blacks having “civil rights and immunities which
are enjoyed by the white people,” including the right to bear arms.

Another was Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, the lawyer
for the slave owner in the 1857 Dred Scott case, which refused to
recognize African Americans as citizens because it would give
them “the full liberty of speech . . ., and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

Sen. Henry Wilson of Massachusetts " who later became vice
president under President Ulysses S. Grant " complained that
Southern militias were “visiting the freedmen, disarming them,”
but the city of Chicago would ignore the rest of Wilson’s
sentence: “perpetrating murders and outrages on them.” Is that okay?