Growing up in the Blackwell household in the central city neighborhoods of Cincinnati informed my public policy work as mayor of the Queen City and as an undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Families like mine — low income, civically engaged, and responsible — expected access to firearms for safety. Then, as now, criminals were not inclined to break into a house where the owner was armed.

 

Things were tougher in the South where the Deacons of Defense, most of whom were veterans like my father, chased away KKK riders and thugs. These groups of armed men patrolled their neighborhoods to keep them safe at night. Whether it’s an individual or a family who has to fight against random criminals or organized threats, our lives are evidence that Americans, particularly women and minorities in today’s urban areas, need our Second Amendment rights.

From another column by Blackwell:

From their beginnings, gun control measures have worked to create legal disparities, granting unequal rights to members of various socioeconomic groups.

 

In fact, restrictive gun laws have long been employed to the benefit of a select elite while circumscribing the liberty of populations less popular or less powerful.

 

Gun control measures, from the slave gun bans of the 1700s South to the Brady Bill regulations of the 1990s have unfairly targeted black Americans and have worked to curtail a disproportionate number of their constitutional rights. Access to firearms was understood by our founders and many early American jurists as an essential aspect of full US citizenship, and it was for this reason that the Black Codes established after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment -- which constitutionally abolished slavery -- prevented black freemen from owning guns...

 

Examining both our nation’s constitution and the history of gun rights in America, the right to keep and bear arms has been at the forefront of our nation’s march to liberty and equality. The Second Amendment, which empowers Americans to embrace all of the freedoms and responsibilities their citizenship entails, has been the catalyst of tremendous social progress.

From another of Blackwell's columns:

What kind of “right” do you have, when the government can completely rob you of 100% of the exercise of that right, anytime they decide they have a good reason?

 

That’s like saying you have the right to worship as you choose, but the government has the power to ban attending church. Or that you have the right to free speech, but that government has the power to stop you from speaking about any subject it wants. Or that you have the right against unreasonable searches and seizures, but that anything the government wants to search at your house is automatically reasonable.

 

A right that the government can completely take away at any time is no right at all.

So to say that the Second Amendment means you can own guns, but that the city where you live can ban all gun ownership, then you have no Second Amendment rights at all.

More of Ken Blackwell's writings on guns and the Second Amendment here.