The Second Amendment Was Never Meant for Everyone | After the killing of Alex Pretti, white America is realizing what Black gun owners have always known: Rights are conditional
The Second Amendment Was Never Meant for Everyone | After the killing of Alex Pretti, white America is realizing what Black gun owners have always known: Rights are conditional
The police state is certainly being held at bay by my 9mm! /s
No-Side5747 on
This article perfectly illustrates how the Second Amendment was never about universal rights but about maintaining white supremacy. The fact that Reagan and the NRA supported gun control when the Black Panthers were legally carrying firearms tells you everything you need to know about whose rights actually matter in America.
Hrmbee on
Historical issues highlighted for consideration:
>What made Pretti’s death distinct, at least in the public imagination, was who he was supposed to represent. Pretti fit the cultural archetype of the “responsible” gun owner: white, licensed, gainfully employed. His killing unsettled a long-held assumption within mainstream gun culture that the Second Amendment is a time-tested shield for people who follow the rules. Suddenly, the distance between constitutional promise and state practice felt uncomfortably small.
>
>But that realization — that rights only exist at the discretion of those who enforce them — is hardly new. For Black, Brown, and Indigenous Americans, the Second Amendment has long been filtered through policing, surveillance, and the routine threat of state force. Long before Pretti, communities of color learned that constitutional protections do not operate in abstraction; they operate through institutions with guns, authority, and the power to decide in real time whose rights are recognized and whose are ignored.
>
>…
>
>After the Revolutionary War, the newly formed United States was deeply suspicious of a standing federal army. But for the planter South, another fear loomed larger: maintaining the internal security of a slave society. As Anderson contends, the Second Amendment functioned as a political “bribe to the South to not scuttle the Constitution.” George Mason warned placing militias under federal control would leave slaveholding states “defenseless,” not from foreign invasion, but from enslaved people. The compromise was an assurance that slave patrols and local armed forces would remain intact and beyond the reaches of federal interference.
>
>This same logic extended to the violent disarmament of Indigenous nations. In 1838, a state-backed militia forcibly stripped nearly 800 Potawatomi people of their weapons and drove them from Indiana to Kansas in what came to be known as the Potawatomi Trail of Death, a 660-mile forced removal that killed more than 40 people, most of whom were children or elderly people. That same year, U.S. troops systematically disarmed Cherokee communities to preempt resistance and expelled roughly 16,000 people from their land under the promise of federal protection; instead, nearly 4,000 died from disease, starvation, and exposure along the Trail of Tears. By 1890, Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee were ordered to surrender their weapons before U.S. soldiers opened fire, massacring up to 300 men, women, and children. These tragic events forever calcified a lesson Indigenous communities had already learned through generations of bloodshed; in America, guns are not a universal right, but an instrument of upholding the racial order.
>
>…
>
>It’s a legacy that lives on today. Counties that saw higher numbers of racial lynchings from 1877 to 1950 — many carried out with the complicity or direct assistance of local law enforcement — had higher rates of officer-involved killings of Black people, tying modern police violence to a longer continuum of racial terror rather than isolated incidents of brutality.
>
>…
>
>From the 1970s on, it was no longer politically viable to pursue broad gun bans rooted in overt white fear, and the modern gun movement was consolidated when new leadership took control of the NRA and transformed it from a conservative shooting club into a hard-line “no compromise” political lobbying organization committed to opposing gun control in nearly all forms.
>
>As a result, gun regulation increasingly operated less through formal prohibition than selective enforcement by law enforcement on the street. As sociologist Jennifer Carlson argues in “Policing the Second Amendment,” police both drive a significant share of gun deaths in Black and Brown communities and remain “central to how gun policy is executed on the ground,” historically through discriminatory permitting systems and higher rates of gun prosecutions. The shift produced what she calls “gun populism,” a framework in which police and policymakers distinguish between “good guys with guns,” typically imagined as white and middle-class, and “bad guys with guns,” who are disproportionately coded as Black, Brown, and poor.
>
>The results are not abstract. They show up in bodies.
>
>…
>
>In stark contrast, armed white men who kill protesters, occupy federal buildings, or aim rifles at police during standoffs are often treated as political actors, not existential threats. Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of murder charges after shooting and killing two protesters, and later bestowed with President Donald Trump’s blessing. The Bundy family walked free after an armed standoff in 2016 with federal authorities and were praised as symbols of individual freedom for standing up to the government.
>
>This is the real modern enforcement mechanism of the Second Amendment. Not the Supreme Court. Not Congress. But the thin blue line that decides, in seconds, whose rights count and whose do not.
>
>It’s why Pretti’s killing has landed differently. For many white Americans, their understanding of the Second Amendment shifted in a moment — when the fantasy of universal gun rights met the reality of state violence. Many realized, for the first time, that exercising their right to bear arms is now a life-and-death gamble.
History has shown, and current events are proving out yet again that any rights that are contingent on the continued approval of those in power are not actual rights. This goes far beyond gun rights, and extends more broadly to civil rights in general. That the government can suspend or ignore these rights shows that they’re not worth the papers that they’re printed on. If the public and the politicians that represent each community are serious about rights, then these need to be codified in a way that they must be applicable to all, and cannot be suspended through the whims of the powerful, and there need to be mechanisms in place that will ensure this regardless of the people in power.
HaroldGreenBandana on
I love how the tough guy right-wingers always say things like, “if you just do what you’re supposed to and not (do whatever you were doing), you won’t get in (whatever bad situation).” Example: “If Pretti just wouldn’t have protested, he wouldn’t have…” But then those same motherfuckers cling to 2A and buy up ARs by the dozen because, why exactly? They plan to do what they are “supposed to” and they think the authorities are always going to have their interests in mind?
samsounder on
Goddamn it people
The second amendment is very clear. It is so a state can raise a militia to defend itself.
It exists because native Americans were raiding the colonies and the crown wouldn’t allow the colonies to form a militia to defend themselves because it could be used against them as well
If Minnesota had a state ran, well-regulated militia the the federal government would not invade because they’d be shot
ttkciar on
Rights are ***not*** conditional.
They can be ***infringed,*** but infringing on a right isn’t the same as it not existing in the first place.
Infringing on a right *causes injustice.* If the right didn’t exist, or if it were conditional, then infringing upon it wouldn’t cause injustice.
Denying PoC their RKBA has caused injustice a-plenty, because it is in fact a *right.*
The article’s premise, that rights are granted or withheld by the government, is dangerous and wrong.
NotAnotherEmpire on
Longstanding Black Panther observation. You want gun control, have a bunch of armed “those people” show up.
OhGodSoManyQuestions on
The **Dual State** [Ernst Fraenkel] concept explains so much about the American past.
>The dual state is a model in which the functioning of a state is divided into a normative state, which operates according to set rules and regulations, and a prerogative state, “which exercises unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees”.
Fraenkel was writing about Nazi Germany at the time. But Nazi Germany’s “race laws” were based very directly on the US’s on Jim Crow laws.
Biomirth on
George Carlin had an opinion on this. IE, GC was right about rights. They aren’t rights, they’re privileges. His bit is worth watching.
everything_is_bad on
Due to CA gun laws it’s easier for an ice agent to buy a gun than you.
816blackout on
What the fuck is this attitude? They are for EVERYONE. Trans, POC, idgaf. Go buy a gun. Now.
Alwaystired254 on
Yes. I’m really disappointed that the 2A folks chose their tribal leader over their “values”
They lost all credibility.
zaccus on
Lol we’ve always known that, who do you think designed the system?
voyagerdoge on
Internationally, you see something similar with regard to human rights.
lnin0 on
Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country: a bill of temporary privileges. – George Carlin
nohann on
Rights have always been conditional…when you are dead there are no other conditions
ItsJustForMyOwnKicks on
We are grappling with one of the greatest cons ever. Right wingers were taught to believe our rights as Americans come from a higher power.
They don’t.
Rights exist at the will and whim of our rulers. Get the wrong leaders in and they vanish without recourse. Like now.
GaimeGuy on
holy shit he wasn’t killed for owning a gun. Stop hijacking what’s happening in Minnesota to make it about the 2nd amendment. It’s an affront to his memory and to the living
guyincognito121 on
For the record, plenty of us were aware of and angry about this before.
Harbinger2001 on
I always get annoyed at people who think their rights are “God Given”. No they fucking aren’t. You have the rights society lets you have. And sometimes that is based on race, class, religion, gender, etc.
starkraver on
The Heller decision was always widely anti- historical
TristanDuboisOLG on
Wow, some really stupid opinions in this comment section AND the article.
SanctimoniousVegoon on
Conditional rights = privileges
Kwerby on
George Carlin said it best.
“Rights aren’t “rights” if someone can take them away- They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country: a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news, even badly, you know that the list
gets shorter and shorter.”
bigdog701 on
I will defend myself, my family, and my community regardless of a piece of paper.
DifferentEvent2998 on
But they NEED them in case a tyrannical government tries to something something.
AspieRoo on
So what do you use to defend against actual tyranny, which is corporate ownership of America? Because orange Hitler will be gone at some point, but your corporate overlords will still be there.
gorobotkillkill on
Fuck that. Stop trying to make it about race.
It’s about power. Always has been.
vim_deezel on
Nah it was meant for regular citizens, because we had guns for 150 years before I guess anyone noticed and started to want to take them away, I find that… suspect… that suddenly 2nd amendment doesn’t exist for normies and only for armies and state militias. Also it has stood up in court under virtually all challenges to be exactly that, but I guess gun grabbers want to ignore that.
DonktorDonkenstein on
I’ve long maintained that guns ownership would not stop a hypothetical tyrannical government, and in fact, the only reason gun ownership for the general public has been permitted is because the elites do not fear an armed populace. I’ve also been quite sure in my prediction, for a while now, that it would be Republicans who would make the first move to restrict ownership. They have a long history with screwing around with it, using support for the 2nd Amendment as a political football because they know there are tons of single-issue voters who will vote based on gun rhetoric alone. But here we are, now the ammosexuals are suddenly very circumspect on who can own guns and where they are allowed to take them.
I have little doubt that we are going to see how little regard the ruling regime in this country have for citizen’s rights on a massive scale very soon now. And I seriously doubt they are worried about armed uprising, they’ve spent decades balkanizing our society, to the point where we are infinity more likely to wage war amongst ourselves than to unite against the wealthy elites, aka the Epstein-class.
Economy_Energy_1339 on
Something liberals should know. You bring a gun to a police operation and interject yourself, there’s a chance something bad could happen
Wonderful-Process792 on
Let’s see if they can work a racism angle into this story about gun rights in the case of the cops shooting an armed white guy…
Yes, by jove! They’ve done it!!!
nevergiveup234 on
Bari Weiss involved too
Manofalltrade on
Gun control under Dems was a nuisance. Gun control from Republicans is a threat.
ryanknapper on
*All* rights are conditional. None of our inalienable rights are actually inalienable.
Queermagedd0n on
If you’re not a straight white cis man, your rights will *always* be conditional in the US.
Malaix on
This will be an age of horrific clarity when the unspoken and tolerated terrible truths of our society and our world become too great for us to ignore. Carny spoke on it in terms of international relationships but it is true both locally like in the US and globally with things like the growing climate change.
We can’t afford to ignore the festering problems that have been growing in our cocoons of comfort. We have to see what is really happening and we have to make choices on what we as a society and a species want the future to be and take the action to get there and do it soon.
sunbeatsfog on
They hated it when the Black Panthers took up guns
38 Comments
The police state is certainly being held at bay by my 9mm! /s
This article perfectly illustrates how the Second Amendment was never about universal rights but about maintaining white supremacy. The fact that Reagan and the NRA supported gun control when the Black Panthers were legally carrying firearms tells you everything you need to know about whose rights actually matter in America.
Historical issues highlighted for consideration:
>What made Pretti’s death distinct, at least in the public imagination, was who he was supposed to represent. Pretti fit the cultural archetype of the “responsible” gun owner: white, licensed, gainfully employed. His killing unsettled a long-held assumption within mainstream gun culture that the Second Amendment is a time-tested shield for people who follow the rules. Suddenly, the distance between constitutional promise and state practice felt uncomfortably small.
>
>But that realization — that rights only exist at the discretion of those who enforce them — is hardly new. For Black, Brown, and Indigenous Americans, the Second Amendment has long been filtered through policing, surveillance, and the routine threat of state force. Long before Pretti, communities of color learned that constitutional protections do not operate in abstraction; they operate through institutions with guns, authority, and the power to decide in real time whose rights are recognized and whose are ignored.
>
>…
>
>After the Revolutionary War, the newly formed United States was deeply suspicious of a standing federal army. But for the planter South, another fear loomed larger: maintaining the internal security of a slave society. As Anderson contends, the Second Amendment functioned as a political “bribe to the South to not scuttle the Constitution.” George Mason warned placing militias under federal control would leave slaveholding states “defenseless,” not from foreign invasion, but from enslaved people. The compromise was an assurance that slave patrols and local armed forces would remain intact and beyond the reaches of federal interference.
>
>This same logic extended to the violent disarmament of Indigenous nations. In 1838, a state-backed militia forcibly stripped nearly 800 Potawatomi people of their weapons and drove them from Indiana to Kansas in what came to be known as the Potawatomi Trail of Death, a 660-mile forced removal that killed more than 40 people, most of whom were children or elderly people. That same year, U.S. troops systematically disarmed Cherokee communities to preempt resistance and expelled roughly 16,000 people from their land under the promise of federal protection; instead, nearly 4,000 died from disease, starvation, and exposure along the Trail of Tears. By 1890, Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee were ordered to surrender their weapons before U.S. soldiers opened fire, massacring up to 300 men, women, and children. These tragic events forever calcified a lesson Indigenous communities had already learned through generations of bloodshed; in America, guns are not a universal right, but an instrument of upholding the racial order.
>
>…
>
>It’s a legacy that lives on today. Counties that saw higher numbers of racial lynchings from 1877 to 1950 — many carried out with the complicity or direct assistance of local law enforcement — had higher rates of officer-involved killings of Black people, tying modern police violence to a longer continuum of racial terror rather than isolated incidents of brutality.
>
>…
>
>From the 1970s on, it was no longer politically viable to pursue broad gun bans rooted in overt white fear, and the modern gun movement was consolidated when new leadership took control of the NRA and transformed it from a conservative shooting club into a hard-line “no compromise” political lobbying organization committed to opposing gun control in nearly all forms.
>
>As a result, gun regulation increasingly operated less through formal prohibition than selective enforcement by law enforcement on the street. As sociologist Jennifer Carlson argues in “Policing the Second Amendment,” police both drive a significant share of gun deaths in Black and Brown communities and remain “central to how gun policy is executed on the ground,” historically through discriminatory permitting systems and higher rates of gun prosecutions. The shift produced what she calls “gun populism,” a framework in which police and policymakers distinguish between “good guys with guns,” typically imagined as white and middle-class, and “bad guys with guns,” who are disproportionately coded as Black, Brown, and poor.
>
>The results are not abstract. They show up in bodies.
>
>…
>
>In stark contrast, armed white men who kill protesters, occupy federal buildings, or aim rifles at police during standoffs are often treated as political actors, not existential threats. Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of murder charges after shooting and killing two protesters, and later bestowed with President Donald Trump’s blessing. The Bundy family walked free after an armed standoff in 2016 with federal authorities and were praised as symbols of individual freedom for standing up to the government.
>
>This is the real modern enforcement mechanism of the Second Amendment. Not the Supreme Court. Not Congress. But the thin blue line that decides, in seconds, whose rights count and whose do not.
>
>It’s why Pretti’s killing has landed differently. For many white Americans, their understanding of the Second Amendment shifted in a moment — when the fantasy of universal gun rights met the reality of state violence. Many realized, for the first time, that exercising their right to bear arms is now a life-and-death gamble.
History has shown, and current events are proving out yet again that any rights that are contingent on the continued approval of those in power are not actual rights. This goes far beyond gun rights, and extends more broadly to civil rights in general. That the government can suspend or ignore these rights shows that they’re not worth the papers that they’re printed on. If the public and the politicians that represent each community are serious about rights, then these need to be codified in a way that they must be applicable to all, and cannot be suspended through the whims of the powerful, and there need to be mechanisms in place that will ensure this regardless of the people in power.
I love how the tough guy right-wingers always say things like, “if you just do what you’re supposed to and not (do whatever you were doing), you won’t get in (whatever bad situation).” Example: “If Pretti just wouldn’t have protested, he wouldn’t have…” But then those same motherfuckers cling to 2A and buy up ARs by the dozen because, why exactly? They plan to do what they are “supposed to” and they think the authorities are always going to have their interests in mind?
Goddamn it people
The second amendment is very clear. It is so a state can raise a militia to defend itself.
It exists because native Americans were raiding the colonies and the crown wouldn’t allow the colonies to form a militia to defend themselves because it could be used against them as well
If Minnesota had a state ran, well-regulated militia the the federal government would not invade because they’d be shot
Rights are ***not*** conditional.
They can be ***infringed,*** but infringing on a right isn’t the same as it not existing in the first place.
Infringing on a right *causes injustice.* If the right didn’t exist, or if it were conditional, then infringing upon it wouldn’t cause injustice.
Denying PoC their RKBA has caused injustice a-plenty, because it is in fact a *right.*
The article’s premise, that rights are granted or withheld by the government, is dangerous and wrong.
Longstanding Black Panther observation. You want gun control, have a bunch of armed “those people” show up.
The **Dual State** [Ernst Fraenkel] concept explains so much about the American past.
>The dual state is a model in which the functioning of a state is divided into a normative state, which operates according to set rules and regulations, and a prerogative state, “which exercises unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees”.
Fraenkel was writing about Nazi Germany at the time. But Nazi Germany’s “race laws” were based very directly on the US’s on Jim Crow laws.
George Carlin had an opinion on this. IE, GC was right about rights. They aren’t rights, they’re privileges. His bit is worth watching.
Due to CA gun laws it’s easier for an ice agent to buy a gun than you.
What the fuck is this attitude? They are for EVERYONE. Trans, POC, idgaf. Go buy a gun. Now.
Yes. I’m really disappointed that the 2A folks chose their tribal leader over their “values”
They lost all credibility.
Lol we’ve always known that, who do you think designed the system?
Internationally, you see something similar with regard to human rights.
Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country: a bill of temporary privileges. – George Carlin
Rights have always been conditional…when you are dead there are no other conditions
We are grappling with one of the greatest cons ever. Right wingers were taught to believe our rights as Americans come from a higher power.
They don’t.
Rights exist at the will and whim of our rulers. Get the wrong leaders in and they vanish without recourse. Like now.
holy shit he wasn’t killed for owning a gun. Stop hijacking what’s happening in Minnesota to make it about the 2nd amendment. It’s an affront to his memory and to the living
For the record, plenty of us were aware of and angry about this before.
I always get annoyed at people who think their rights are “God Given”. No they fucking aren’t. You have the rights society lets you have. And sometimes that is based on race, class, religion, gender, etc.
The Heller decision was always widely anti- historical
Wow, some really stupid opinions in this comment section AND the article.
Conditional rights = privileges
George Carlin said it best.
“Rights aren’t “rights” if someone can take them away- They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country: a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news, even badly, you know that the list
gets shorter and shorter.”
I will defend myself, my family, and my community regardless of a piece of paper.
But they NEED them in case a tyrannical government tries to something something.
So what do you use to defend against actual tyranny, which is corporate ownership of America? Because orange Hitler will be gone at some point, but your corporate overlords will still be there.
Fuck that. Stop trying to make it about race.
It’s about power. Always has been.
Nah it was meant for regular citizens, because we had guns for 150 years before I guess anyone noticed and started to want to take them away, I find that… suspect… that suddenly 2nd amendment doesn’t exist for normies and only for armies and state militias. Also it has stood up in court under virtually all challenges to be exactly that, but I guess gun grabbers want to ignore that.
I’ve long maintained that guns ownership would not stop a hypothetical tyrannical government, and in fact, the only reason gun ownership for the general public has been permitted is because the elites do not fear an armed populace. I’ve also been quite sure in my prediction, for a while now, that it would be Republicans who would make the first move to restrict ownership. They have a long history with screwing around with it, using support for the 2nd Amendment as a political football because they know there are tons of single-issue voters who will vote based on gun rhetoric alone. But here we are, now the ammosexuals are suddenly very circumspect on who can own guns and where they are allowed to take them.
I have little doubt that we are going to see how little regard the ruling regime in this country have for citizen’s rights on a massive scale very soon now. And I seriously doubt they are worried about armed uprising, they’ve spent decades balkanizing our society, to the point where we are infinity more likely to wage war amongst ourselves than to unite against the wealthy elites, aka the Epstein-class.
Something liberals should know. You bring a gun to a police operation and interject yourself, there’s a chance something bad could happen
Let’s see if they can work a racism angle into this story about gun rights in the case of the cops shooting an armed white guy…
Yes, by jove! They’ve done it!!!
Bari Weiss involved too
Gun control under Dems was a nuisance. Gun control from Republicans is a threat.
*All* rights are conditional. None of our inalienable rights are actually inalienable.
If you’re not a straight white cis man, your rights will *always* be conditional in the US.
This will be an age of horrific clarity when the unspoken and tolerated terrible truths of our society and our world become too great for us to ignore. Carny spoke on it in terms of international relationships but it is true both locally like in the US and globally with things like the growing climate change.
We can’t afford to ignore the festering problems that have been growing in our cocoons of comfort. We have to see what is really happening and we have to make choices on what we as a society and a species want the future to be and take the action to get there and do it soon.
They hated it when the Black Panthers took up guns