Actor Danny Glover discussed the roots of the Second Amendment during a recent college appearance, saying the legislation was ratified to protect against slave revolts. Now, a conservative student group is launching a petition against the school's "leftist bias."
Glover appeared at Texas A&M on Thursday, Jan. 17 for an event honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when the conversation turned to the right to bear arms, according to RawStory. Glover proceeded to discuss the Second Amendment, and how it was written to protect the institution of slavery and to help secure Native American land.
“I don’t know if you know the genesis of the right to bear arms,” Glover said. “The Second Amendment comes from the right to protect themselves from slave revolts, and from uprisings by Native Americans. So, a revolt from people who were stolen from their land, or revolt from people whose land was stolen from, that’s what the genesis of the Second Amendment is.”
Texas A&M officials didn't know Glover was going to talk about the Second Amendment, according to Campus Reform, a conservative activist group. “I had no idea, we really didn’t know that topic was coming up,” the director of Texas A&M’s Memorial Student Center, Luke Altendorf, told Campus Reform. “Someone was asking a question about activism, I think that’s where some of that came from.”
The video of Glover was first posted by the conservative student organization, Texas Aggie Conservatives. The group has since started a petition against Texas A&M hosting "radical leftist speakers" who promote "leftist bias," and using school funding to do so.
Despite the fact that the petition groups Glover's comments under the umbrella of "far-left agenda," some constitutional scholars have shared his same theories.
Author and radio personality Thom Hartmann describes how the Second Amendment was written to "preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote" in a blog post for Truth-Out.org.
Mother Jones also posited the theory in a 2008 article. "[Some] scholars believe the founders enshrined the right to bear arms in the Constitution in part to enforce tyranny, not fight it," Mother Jones reporter Stephanie Mencimer wrote. Explaining, "the 'well-regulated militias' cited in the Constitution almost certainly referred to state militias that were used to suppress slave insurrections."
Watch Danny Glover's Texas A&M discussion below.