The Racist and Genocidal History of the 2nd Amendment 

Book Review by Ray Omdahl of The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment by Thom Hartmann.

Don’t let the long title scare you. The book is less than 200 pages in pocketbook form. It is written in an easy-to-read style. This book explains the sordid birth of the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution and how its meaning is now being distorted.

Hartmann is the most popular progressive radio host who has written more than 25 books and is a New York Times best-selling author. He tells the bloody history of the 2^nd Amendment from when it was ratified in 1791 to the present.

The author recounts how the 2nd Amendment was included to empower southern slaveholders, who feared the Constitution would disarm their runaway slave militias and keep the slaves in “their place.”

Quotes from many writers and historians make it clear this book is not just Hartmann’s opinion.

Two quotes expose the blatant racism of the 1700s and 1800s:

“The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their (Iroquois native) settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” — Orders of George Washington to Major General John Sullivan, May 31, 1779.

“They (Southwestern tribes) have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habit, nor the desire for improvement, which are essential to any favorable change in their condition. Established in the midst of another and superior race, and without appreciating the cause of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear. — President Andrew Jackson, in his fifth State of the Union address to Congress, December 3, 1833.

US: worst record of gun deaths

The book includes this statement from Simon Chapman, a professor at the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health. “The results are clear. Gun deaths are a problem amenable to reduction like any other public health problem.”

“International differences in rates between countries show this. The United States has the worst record of gun deaths of any [developed] nation, exceeded only by that in chaotic nations with massive law and order problems.” Our country has twelve times the gun deaths rate than ALL other developed nations.

We mandate licensing and insurance for cars. It’s only sensible to do the same for guns.

According to the Gun Violence Archive, this year we have already exceeded last year’s total deaths by guns. We are now at 22,071 Americans dead from gun violence.

• 12,342 were suicides.
• There have been 360 mass shootings and 27 mass murders.
• 923 children have been killed and 2,475 injured.
• 196 law officers were killed or injured.

“If every American were to read this book and take its message to heart, the lies that are used to divide could lose their power. And we might just find the common ground that so frequently eludes us.” — John Nichols, National Affairs Correspondent, The Nation.

I hope many will read it.