DispositionMatrix
NES Member
Black People Need to Break Up With the Second Amendment
As historian Carol Anderson forcefully argues in her book “The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America,” “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 47.5 million African Americans.”
Despite the ways that gun violence disproportionately affects communities that bear the scars of structural inequality, gun rights activists would have you believe that gun control of any kind represents the “real racism.”
At some point, though, we must come to terms with the fact that the firearm has done little to guarantee our freedoms and even less to protect our lives. At some point, we must acknowledge that the prevention of gun violence is one of the most pressing civil rights issues of our time. With so many lives in the balance, I would argue that point is now.