To make the story short, the U.S. Constitution, 14th Amendment does not exist. It was rejected by more than 1/4th of the States of the Union in the year of 1866.

All the House and Senate Journals of the States of 1866 have been recovered and they show the rejection votes cast by the States. These House and Senate Journals and many other documents are now posted on the Internet at http://www.14th-amendment.com

Gordon Epperly

Let’s review that case:

Blacks in Louisiana who had just obtained their 15th Amendment right to vote went down to the courthouse to do exactly that.

“Concerned” local whites, a mixture of state actors (local police and other officials) and private (Klan), hatched a plan to deal with this “horror”.

They first disarmed the blacks (depriving them of their 2nd Amendment rights), and then launched three days of arson, murder and rape, culminating in burning down the “defiled” courthouse. Federal troops were sent in to restore order and the perpetrators put on trial for Federal civil rights violations, to wit:

* Deprivation of 2nd Amendment rights;

* Deprivation of 1st Amendment rights to peaceful assembly;

* Deprivation of 15th Amendment rights.

The Supreme Court in Cruikshank decreed that the Federal government had no right to prosecute these violations of rights, because only the state could protect the rights of it’s citizens (Louisiana, fat chance that!).

The Cruikshank decision paved the way for horrific violations of equal protection and civil rights abuses later…and at least 4,000 lynchings.

Absolutely no part of the Cruikshank decision can be taken seriously today. If a state deprived it’s citizens of the right to free assembly or voting, the US Department of Justice would stomp on them with both feet, and rightly so.

Yet Cruikshank remains a lynchpin of all gun control laws in the US, underpinning state-law violations of the 2nd Amendment. The California Attorney General as support for his state’s laws violating people’s 2nd Amendment rights has recently cited it. Morton Grove IL cited cases that rest entirely on Cruikshank in support of it’s total handgun ban.

Cruikshank is one of the most evil decisions in US Supreme Court history, and caused more violence than perhaps any other. No serious legal researcher can take it seriously today and resting ANY argument on it is a sign of a very weak argument indeed.

Rather than negating a modern reading of 14th Amendment incorporation via Privileges and Immunities, Cruikshank is a case history supporting the original wisdom of John Bingham and his followers.

Jim March

Oxford University Press has just published A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America