Derbyshire On Sectionalism

He ties it in with our current gun ownership issues:

The current brouhaha over gun control strikes me that way. Listening to the opinionators, I started to think I could do a near-simultaneous translation—a translation, I mean, from the surface chatter about constitutional rights, kid safety, self-defense, and 30-round magazines (not “clips,” for crying out loud) to the underlying ideas in the speakers’ heads. Something like:

Blue guy: “Why does anyone need a 30-round magazine? What use is that, except to commit mayhem?”

[Translation: You dumb ignorant unwashed cracker, you can’t wait to let loose on some harmless crowd of African Americans, can you? Get back to your cabin and jar of corn liquor and relatives with six fingers. You shouldn’t be playing any part in the life of the nation, with your crazy religion and your reactionary social ideas.]

Red guy: “The Second Amendment is the people’s safeguard against tyranny.”

[Translation: You think I don’t know what’ll happen to me and mine if you sissified, overeducated elite hypocrites ever get total power over us? Leave us alone, dammit!]

I’m not being loftily impartial here. I belong to one of those sections. (Take a guess.) I’m just making the point that what this is really about is good old American sectionalism—two big groups of white people who can’t stand the sight of each other. We are eternally re-fighting the Civil War.

(Yes, white people. Blacks are hors de combat here, as they mostly were in the Civil War, neither side of which liked or trusted them. Sherman would not let colored troops march armed in the Grand Parade. Some black pioneer units marched with picks and shovels, but they were regarded as comic relief by the spectators and newspapers. Nobody cares what the generality of blacks think, no more now than in 1865. This war, like that one, is an intra-white affair.)

Click the link to read the rest. I think he's spot-on in his analysis.