I stumbled across this elsewhere, and have seen conflicting results on google about it.
The argument was that the 2nd Amendment was created, not entirely, but largely so that slave owners could own guns to keep slaves in line and crush any uprisings. Additionally, it was said, that the militias mentioned in the 2nd Amendment were not the state militias that fought under General George Washington, but rather the armed militias that hunted down escaped slaves.
Could you fine people provide some clarity?
Hello. I've answered similar questions in the past and the answer to this one may help clarify some things related to why they created it in the first place.. That said, it is theoretically possible that slavery was an influence into creating the 2A, but definitely was not the driving factor. As I outline in my question above, 2A was created in response to agrarian uprisings that were happening all over America during the 1780s.
Additionally, it was said, that the militias mentioned in the 2nd Amendment were not the state militias that fought under General George Washington, but rather the armed militias that hunted down escaped slaves.
No. No way. There is literally zero evidence to support this claim. Arguments like this stem from a piece of legal scholarship that emerged almost 20 years ago from Carl T. Bogus, a respected law professor who argued that slavery was a driving force behind the creation of the amendment. He primarily argued this based off of the high number of slave-owning individuals in the south who were afraid of slave rebellions. It’s a plausible theory, but not one eagerly embraced by the history community – and again it was published nearly 20 years ago. Still, it is worth remembering that in America during this period, hundreds of thousands of slaves were in the country – many who had took up arms with the British during the war for independence. Americans knew this and they did know that the best way to control enslaved individuals were with firearms. Still, there is no way you could argue that the militias mentioned in the Bill of Rights were talking about these folks who wanted to subdue their slaves.
How do we know this? A few ways. But primarily, there were no slave uprisings in America at all during this period. Zero. Some slaves ran away, a few individuals had attacked overseers, but there were no revolts. On the flip side, America had armed uprisings all over the place! There were violent uprisings in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and many others. The gentry were worried about these people, and they created the 2A because the only way they were ever able to put down rebellions and uprisings were by using well-trained militias.