Every so often, we see someone try to make the case that gun rights are racist, that the only reason to value the right to keep and bear arms is our innate racism. Never mind the whole Second Amendment thing or any of the reasons the founders gave for that. Nope, it has to be racist.

But a growing tactic has been to claim the Second Amendment itself is racist.

Over at the National Review, David Harsanyi took a swing at recent book making that claim.

Left-wing academic Carol Anderson’s new book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, is all over the news. “The Second Amendment is not about guns — it’s about anti-Blackness, a new book argues,” reads a CNN headline. NPR claims that the author has uncovered the racist “roots” of the Second Amendment.

This is wishful thinking. The Second is an attempt — much like the 1619 Project — to reimagine history in purely racial terms. The result is tendentious polemic that suffers not only from a paucity of historical evidence, but from a dishonest rendering of the facts we do know.

After comprehensively detailing the constitutional debate over slavery and the nefariousness of that institution, Anderson takes the liberty of asserting that the Second Amendment was “not some hallowed ground but rather a bribe, paid again with Black bodies.” This is a contention that isn’t backed by a single contemporaneous quote or piece of hard evidence in the book.

I advise you to go and read the whole thing. It’s quite good.

When you’re done there, go watch Cam’s own debunking of the claim here:

Honestly, I’m disgusted we even have to go through this once, much less multiple times, but this is where we are today.

See, during the Obama presidency, the left found a new tool. They’d always labeled certain things racist but they found that if they claim the opposition itself is racist, not just on certain issues but on everything, then they could bully a lot of people around. No one wants to be called racist, so even though some disagreed with the issue, they shut up lest they be branded as the dreaded “R” word.

That effort has only continued to grow in the years since and this is simply the latest effort.

On some level, they know that the gun control Utopia they envision will never come to fruition so long as the Second Amendment exists. Rather than try and campaign against it on grounds that it’s outdated or unnecessary–admittedly, grounds they’d lose on–they’re trying to claim it’s racist instead, even going so far as to manufacture any evidence they can.

Yet these are the same people who routinely ignore the well-documented fact that the gun control they love so much actually does have racist roots. It was created to disarm black men and women in order to prevent them from defending themselves from racist attacks. The early version of the Klan didn’t particularly care to have their targets being able to fight back.

Even Reconstruction-era laws that looked like they applied to everyone didn’t. After all, everyone knew that a white sheriff wasn’t going to arrest a white man just because he broke a law that was only meant to restrain black folks.

Funny how the Everything Is Racist crowd doesn’t seem to want to talk about that. They’ll tear down statues and rename school and try to remove any vestige of that era…except for the most pernicious and onerous legacy of that age. Then again, the one thing I don’t actually expect out of that crowd is any consistency of thought.