American Carnage
I. Fundamental fact of American History
Everything about the United States starts with the papal Bulls of the mid and late 1500s giving Christian discoverers the right to “invade, capture, vanquish and subdue all Saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ; to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery,” and “take away all their possessions and property.” Steven T. Newcomb. This religious doctrine was responsible for the catastrophic genocides in South and central America.
II. English Christian settlers adopted and followed these papal bulls. These were the basis for the genocidal war against the indigenous American peoples, and black slavery.
III. Guns allowed this to happen. And in America there were two facets:
- Guns were used to annihilate indigenous peoples.
- Guns were used to control black slaves
IV. The second amendment: “a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of free state the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
- Historically, militias referred to individual small groups dating to colonial times a 100 years before the revolution.
- Gun ownership was mandated and was used for protection and for attacking Indians and scalping parties.
- The second amendment and individual gun ownership was about their use in decimating Indian populations by the settler colonists.
- It was always about anti-blackness and controlling slaves by slave owners who lived in constant fear of slave revolts and rebellions (and there were many). The Haitian revolution, the only successful slave revolution terrified southern plantation owners.
References:
- Steven T. Newcomb Pagans In The Promised Land: Fulcrum Press, 2008, Golden Colorado
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment. City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133. (www.citylight.com).
- Anderson, Carol The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America.
Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc. 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018,
Howard P. Charman, MD 6-14-2021