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By Root 742 0

history than we would like to believe. Currently, the federal government reaps the tax and trade benefits of our nation being the number one producer and exporter of arms; yet, restricts the right to keep and bear arms.10 The trend in disarming American individuals is not new. During the period after the Civil War, southern governments enacted Black Codes, which prohibited freed slaves and all blacks from owning and bearing firearms. By disarming the former slaves, the Codes made it virtually impossible for them to defend themselves from the violent actions of the KKK. KKK-inspired assaults on self-defense soon spread to the North, and similar statutes were enforced in states, such as New York, which disarmed blacks, Irish, Italians, Jews, and other immigrant groups.

Partly in response to and partly in anticipation of the southern governments depriving blacks of their basic liberties, Congress enacted the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment generally applies the protections of the Bill of Rights to the states. Stated differently, the Fourteenth Amendment imposes the same restraints on the states that the first eight amendments impose on the federal government. There are some exceptions to this; though, for the most part, it is the case.

Statutes such as those enacted after the Civil War and in subsequent periods are exactly the atrocities the Second Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment were meant to prevent. And while it does not take a wise man to recognize the advantages of an unarmed citizenry, if we are unable to learn from history’s lessons, we are fools destined to repeat them.

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Federal Denial of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

The Founders envisioned a nation where the government held limited powers and the people were able to live their daily lives with little interference from any government. Within this vision was the power of individuals to defend their property from criminals, other foreign entities, and tyrannical domestic governments. Yet, our current and past governments continually seek legislative tools to circumvent the Second Amendment. The initial efforts of state governments were shamefully blatant in their attempts to disarm the black citizenry, but over time, the state governments and the federal government sought to impair the right of all non-government persons to keep and bear arms.

The first of the federal acts interfering with the right to self-defense was the National Firearms Act of 1934. In the guise of raising revenues, the government began to require registrations and taxation on the transfer of weapons. Today, the registration of a gun is the status quo, and we are taxed on everything from food to the shampoo we buy at the store. However, the National Firearms Act placed a two-hundred-dollar tax on the registration of shotguns. This tax is even more exorbitant when you consider that a brand-new shotgun only cost $6.95 in a 1938 Sears catalogue. The government claimed it was trying to raise revenues and not prohibit guns; yet, what other conclusion can one come to when a tax is thirty times more than the price of the product?

Continuing the assault on natural rights by the feds, the Supreme Court got in on the action. On June 22nd 1938, Treasury agents looking to make a bootlegging bust stopped Frank Layton and Jack Miller as they drove through Arkansas. To their despair, Layton and Miller’s car contained no illicit bootlegging equipment; however, the men were in possession of an unregistered sawed-off shotgun. The reason for the arrest was the length of the gun’s barrel. Had it been two inches longer, and thus comparable in size to those used by the military at the time, Miller and Layton would not have been arrested. The comparability to military weapons was the premise—a historically inaccurate, profoundly unconstitutional, and Natural Law–violating premise—of the 1934 Act. Progressives in Congress took the phrase “a well regulated Militia” in the text of the Second Amendment and falsely claimed that the Framers intended to protect the ownership of military-style weapons