Contact: Henry Heymering of Maryland Shall Issue, Inc., +1-240-446-6782
WHEATON, Md., Feb. 12 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Maryland Shall Issue, Inc. is pleased to welcome noted historian Clayton E. Cramer to the Maryland area for the start of his new book tour for Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie.
Publisher's Weekly notes: "His most intriguing argument is that, as they became 'tied to defending political rights,' guns also became a symbol of citizenship."
Clayton Cramer shows that the militia was not a distinct, organized group but actually consisted of all able-bodied persons, including women and blacks: "Maryland's 'Act for Military Discipline' of 1638 required 'that every house keeper or housekeepers within this Province shall have ready continually upon all occasions within his her or their house for him or themselves and for every person within his her or their house able to bear armes one Serviceable fixed gunne....'" (Armed America, p. 7)
However, by 1715 blacks (only) were barred from carrying guns: "Maryland echoed Virginia's 1680 law with a 1715 statute that ordered, 'That no Negro or other slave, within this Province, shall be permitted to carry any Gun or other offensive Weapon, from off their Master's Land, without License from their said Master.'" (Armed America, p. 33)
In 1857 we see that guns are very directly tied to citizenship when Maryland resident, Justice Taney wrote the majority opinion in the Dred Scott case in which the Supreme Court decided that blacks were just 2/3 of a person -- because if they were considered full citizens then: "It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right...to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation...and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak...and to keep and carry arms wherever they went."
The history of guns in America, and particularly Maryland, is fascinating and worth the trip to hear Clayton Cramer speak about his new book. Larry Pratt, Executive Director of Gun Owners of America notes: "[Cramer] single- handedly...defused an anti-gun revisionist, professor Michael Bellesiles, who used fraud in his 'research' to 'prove' that Americans knew little about guns until after the War between the States. Cramer knew better and immediately began showing that colonial Americans were even better armed than we are today. It is a great opportunity to get to hear him and meet him this week during his time in our area."
Mr. Cramer will be speaking: Tuesday evening (Feb. 13) at 7 PM in Wheaton, MD at Montgomery Citizens for a Safer Maryland (MCSM); Thursday from 10 PM to 11 PM on the Jim Bohannon radio show; Friday morning from 10:45 AM to 11:30 AM on the G. Gordon Liddy radio show; Friday evening starting at 5 PM at the Books-A-Million, 11 DuPont Circle, Washington, DC, and Saturday February 17th interviewed by Larry Pratt on 'Live Fire' radio show which will be simulcast at noon: http://www.gunowners.org/radio.htm .
SOURCE Maryland Shall Issue, Inc.