Update:

Thom Hartmann:

“Little did Madison realize that one day in the future, weapons manufacturing corporations, newly defined as ‘persons’ by a dysfunctional Supreme Court, would use his Slave Patrol Militia Amendment to protect their right to manufacture and sell assault weapons to be used to murder school children.”

My friend and radio host Nicole Sandler alerted me to an article by someone named, of all things, Professor Carl T. Bogus, titled “The Hidden History of the Second Amendment.” 

What an unfortunate name for someone who appears to have a lot of credibility. His resume includes being a professor of law at Roger William University School of Law and visiting professor at Earl Mack School of Law at Drexel University. In fact:

Professor Bogus has testified before Congress and spoken about these topics across the country. In addition to books and law reviews, his writings appear in opinion journals and newspapers, including The Nation, American Prospect, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Washington Times, and the Providence Journal. He blogs at http://www.carltbogus.com/edmund-a-blog.

In a synopsis, Bogus writes this about his take on origins of the Second Amendment. It’s fascinating:

James Madison wrote the Second Amendment to assure the southern states that Congress would not undermine the slave system by disarming the militia, which were then the principal instruments of slave control throughout the South. [...]

Slavery was becoming increasingly obnoxious to the North, and southern delegates to the Philadelphia convention demanded and got an agreement, somewhat cryptically written into the Constitution, that deprived the federal government of authority to abolish slavery. Mason and Henry raised the specter of Congress using its authority over the militia to do indirectly what it could not do directly. They suggested that Congress might refuse to call forth the militia to suppress an insurrection, send southern militia to New Hampshire, and on this they harped repeatedly disarm the militia. For Virginia and the South, these were chilling prospects. [...]

Madison won the election, and he went to Congress politically committed to supporting a bill of rights. When he drafted that document, he included a provision that with minor modifications became what is now the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

In his 99-page article, Professor Bogus argues that the evidence including an analysis of Madison’s original language, and an understanding of how he and other founders drew on England’s Declaration of Rights strongly suggests that Madison wrote this provision for the specific purpose of assuring his constituency that Congress could not use its newly acquired power to deprive the states of an armed militia. Madison’s concern, Professor Bogus argues, was not hunting, self-defense, national defense, or resistance to governmental tyranny, but slave control.

The “hidden history” of the Second Amendment is important for two reasons. First, it supports the view that the amendment does not grant individuals a right to keep and bear arms for their own purposes; rather it only protects the right to bear arms within the militia, as defined within the main body of the Constitution, under the joint control of the federal and state governments. At the time, the southern states extensively regulated their militias and prescribed their slave control responsibilities. Second, the hidden history is important because it fundamentally changes how we think about the right to keep and bear arms. The Second Amendment takes on an entirely different complexion when instead of being symbolized by a musket in the hands of the minutemen, it is associated with a musket in the hands of the slave holder.

So much for that tyranny thing so many gun zealots insist on bringing up all the time. And how ironic that there is evidence that suggests the person they believe to be such a commie Marxist French gay Kenyan tyrant who is coming for their guns is a descendant of the first African documented slave.

Nearly as ironic as Professor Bogus’s name, in fact.