Constitutional Law

Paper on gun control, race, etc.

"Much Ado About...Something Else: D.C. v. Heller, the Racialized Mythology of the Second Amendment, and Gun Policy Reform."

I actually found it good, on a quick skim, if you allow for what the author has to do to get it published. The core of it deals with how blacks were disarmed under the Slave Codes and then the Black Codes, how the 14th Amendment was meant to stop that, and didn't, how early in the 20th century blacks formed militias for defense against mobs, and how armed resistance was used in the civil rights movement. Oh, and how the California gun controls adopted in the 1960s were specifically aimed at the Black Panthers, and meant to give grounds to arrest and search them.

OK, now try finding a publisher for that in academia! So, to entice potential publishers, you:

1. Add a provocative title. Great job, BTW. I was always lousy at that.

2. Make it sound new by adding a bunch of buzzwords. "Mythology" is great. Everyone likes to be able to think were smart enough to see thru a myth that others believed in. "Community-protective autonomy," "Identity-protective Reform,"

3. Work in race whenever possible. "In a frightening shift, the phenomenon of blacks self-arming in the last two decades has been another instrument of oppression rather than liberty. As gun-related violence in America has increased, African Americans in urban communities disproportionately feel the devastation. Instead of African Americans looking down the barrel of white guns, the perpetrators of gun oppression are other African Americans.216 The racialized rhetoric and mythology of the Second
Amendment, however, have rendered white America complicit with respect to this crisis."

4. Throw in at least one passing claim that NRA is sorta racist. (If you check the fn. to that, it's a claim that NRA at some point showed images of the Los Angeles riots, and those featured Black rioters.).

But if you ignore what was inserted to attract publishers, rest is pretty good. The linked page has the abstract, and if go to the bottom you can download the paper itself in .pdf.

hat tip to Joe Olson..

Full post as published by Of Arms and the Law on April 26, 2008 (boomark / email).