Frequent MSNBC guest and activist Rev. Mark Thompson said Monday on MSNBC’s “The ReidOut” that the Second Amendment was established to prevent slave insurrection.
Partial transcript as follows:
JOY REID: You have the right, the Republican Party, Fox News all saying, buy more guns and then use them.
THOMPSON: Yeah, yeah. Well, and you have, as Reverend Sharpton said, you have people of all races. These were white children that were killed here in Tennessee. All nine, because of an obsolete amendment that was established really, people need to read the history, do your homework folks. The hidden history of the Second Amendment by Professor Carl T. Bogus. An amendment–the Second Amendment was meant to prevent slave insurrection and slave rebellions. That is why people are losing—there was no individual right. That’s what it was really about. They didn’t want to give up their arms to the state to fight the British because they needed to keep arms in the words of Patrick Henry, to fight against insurrections on the plantation.
So that is what this is really all about. It is depraved culture. It is tragic, and might I also say, we have to tie all this up, the gun violence is in the streets, the gun violence in the schools, the gun violence on the part of the police. Grand Jury today decided not to charge eight officers who fired 96 shots at Jayland Walker last June and hit him 46 times and killed him. So this gun culture is a very sick one and we must continue to do something about it. Thoughts and prayers, and Rev and I are ministers and we pray all the time–
REID: That’s right.
THOMPSON: But we’ve to pray with our feet.
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