Quote:
Originally Posted by SamIam
I don't know, either. But I can't help but think of the plight of Afro-Americans in the South as recently as the 60's. They often couldn't vote, were segregated into inadequate schools, etc. Most of the above rights in the Constitution were supposedly in force then, and much good they did.
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And blacks were forbidden arms, sometimes
de jure, more often
de facto. It's difficult lynching anybody who can gutshoot you -- and remedially instructive in humanity if he does.
This is the kind of fun you can get if you are forbidden killing tools. None too civilized, is it? Are you listening, Spexxvet?
Complicity in this is still a stain upon the record of the Democratic Party. The Dixiecrats might not have had the prolonged and quite regrettable influence they had on American politics had the Republican black population retained arms in full measure. This would have brought balance and diversity to the electorate in the Southern states.
(N.B. for our British & Commonwealth readers: this Southern region of the US is those States from Tennessee south to the Gulf and east from Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas to the Atlantic, plus in some sense some of Missouri. Known between 1860-1865 as the Confederacy, it survived as a political entity only during those Civil War years, but remains as a distinct cultural region to this day. It's not been redesignated as "the Southeast" or anything like that. The state of West Virginia owes its origin to the Civil War, having previously been a separate corner of Virginia. West Virginia stayed Union, while Virginia went Confederate and contained the Confederacy's capital of Richmond. That DC and Richmond are about an hour and a half apart by modern highway explains a lot about the campaigns and battles of the American Civil War.)