[Highwayman]

With the current battle with the city on concealed carry I thought this might make a good read about gun rights. Gun rights are about being free citizens. Without gun rights we become subjects, or worst. The complete commentary can be found at the link at the bottom.

That gun rights have played such a pivotal role in racial equality makes the historical correlation between gun control and discriminatory policies unsurprising. From their beginnings, gun control measures have worked to create legal disparities, granting unequal rights to members of various socioeconomic groups.

In fact, restrictive gun laws have long been employed to the benefit of a select elite while circumscribing the liberty of populations less popular or less powerful.

Gun control measures, from the slave gun bans of the 1700s South to the Brady Bill regulations of the 1990s have unfairly targeted black Americans and have worked to curtail a disproportionate number of their constitutional rights. Access to firearms was understood by our founders and many early American jurists as an essential aspect of full US citizenship, and it was for this reason that the Black Codes established after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment -- which constitutionally abolished slavery -- prevented black freemen from owning guns.

In prohibiting blacks from exercising the freedoms granted other Americans in the Second Amendment, the Black Codes emphasized the notion that African-Americans were not true citizens with full human rights. This point was raised by the Majority in Dred Scott v. Sanford in defense of the institution of slavery. By the 1870’s, preventing Blacks from having access to guns had become one of the primary goals of the Ku Klux Klan.

Townhall.com::Second Amendment Freedoms Aided the Civil Rights Movement::By Ken Blackwell