Now for a few words of unsolicited advice for my conservative friends. First, when the film Lincoln is dominating box offices and the Oscar nominations, think very hard before you use slavery as an analogy for anything. Second, make up your mind whether slavery was good or bad, a big deal or a historical footnote. And last, for the love of God, get your history right.

Of course, for the likes of Gun Appreciation Day chairman Larry Ward, those pleas fall in deaf ears. The January 19 activities coinciding with the weekend marking President Barack Obama's second inauguration and Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, Ward insisted, are altogether fitting. It's not just that Gun Appreciation Day "honors the legacy of Dr. King":

"I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country's founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history."

As ThinkProgress suggests, most Americans were probably shocked to learn that John Brown is a hero of the Second Amendment crowd:

Ward also neglects to mention that in fact there were many armed uprisings by slaves, as early as 1526. Armed revolts almost always failed, and often led to retribution by the slave owners, who had the justice system on their side. Most famously, Nat Turner led a rebellion that resulted in 60 white deaths and 100 black deaths. The state later executed 56 blacks accused of being involved in the insurrection, and white mobs beat and killed at least 200 others in revenge.

Ward's historical butchery hardly ends there. As Adam Winkler recounted in The Atlantic, support for controlling guns has long been linked with the color the cold, dead hands grasping them:

After losing the Civil War, Southern states quickly adopted the Black Codes, laws designed to reestablish white supremacy by dictating what the freedmen could and couldn't do. One common provision barred blacks from possessing firearms. To enforce the gun ban, white men riding in posses began terrorizing black communities. In January 1866, Harper's Weekly reported that in Mississippi, such groups had "seized every gun and pistol found in the hands of the (so called) freedmen" in parts of the state. The most infamous of these disarmament posses, of course, was the Ku Klux Klan.

A hundred years later when armed Black Panthers made a display of their constitutionally-protected weaponry at the California state capitol, Governor Ronald Reagan and his allies moved quickly to clamp down. As the Gipper explained, there was "no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons." A year later, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were dead.
In Ward's defense, he may merely have been regurgitating the views of some of the leading lights of the conservative movement. In May 2010, Texas right-wingers approved an overhaul of the state's textbooks which would remove the word "slave" from the term "slave trade." Of course, that omission was in keeping with two others, as Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and Mississippi's Barbour celebrated Confederate History Month in their respective states, each without mentioning slavery. As Barbour put it:

"To me it's a sort of feeling that it's just a nit. That it is not significant. It's trying to make a big deal out of something that doesn't matter for diddly."

Slavery certainly didn't matter for diddly to the Republican National Committee during the confirmation process for Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan three years ago. The RNC, including Michael Steele, objected to Kagan's citation of a speech by Justice Thurgood Marshall in a 1993 tribute to her late mentor. Among the offending if self-evident passages from the 1987 address by Marshall:

[T]he government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite "The Constitution," they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.

Even more alarming to the Republican mind than Marshall's spotlight on the early Constitution ("We the People" included, in the words of the Framers, "the whole Number of free Persons.") was Kagan's approving citation of his belief that the mission of the Supreme Court was to "was to "show a special solicitude for the despised and the disadvantaged." Unable to prevent three-fifths of the Senate from voting on Kagan's nomination, Republicans instead suggested the Founders' three-fifths of a person standard for counting slaves was no defect:

"Does Kagan Still View Constitution 'As Originally Drafted And Conceived' As 'Defective'?" the RNC asked in its research document. "And Does Kagan Still Believe That The Supreme Court's Primary Mission Is To 'Show A Special Solicitude For The Despised And Disadvantaged'?"

According to Glenn Beck, the United States Constitution showed that "special solicitude" towards the slaves from the very beginning. The three-fifths compromise in the Constitution was a feature, not a bug:

"That's why, in the Constitution, African-Americans were deemed three-fifths people, because the Founders wanted to end slavery and they knew if the South could count slaves as full individuals you would never get the control to be able to abolish it."

Besides, Michele Bachmann (R-MN) argued, the Founders worked tirelessly to end the "scourge" of slavery in their lifetimes. As she explained in a fractured American history lesson two years ago:

"How unique in all of the world, that one nation that was the resting point from people groups all across the world. It didn't matter whether they descended from known royalty or whether they were of a higher class or a lower class, it made no difference. Once you got here [to the United States] you were all the same. Isn't that remarkable?...
We know we were not perfect. We know there was slavery that was still tolerated when the nation began. We know that was an evil and it was scourge and a blot and a stain upon our history. But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States. And I think it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forebears, who worked tirelessly, men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country."

Alas, John Quincy Adams was extinguished in 1848. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was not issued until 1863 and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution which ended slavery was not ratified until 1865.
Of course, for Republicans like Arizona Congressman Trent Franks, there are much worse things than slavery. African-Americans, he suggested three years ago, were better off in chains:

In this country, we had slavery for God knows how long. And now we look back on it and we say "How brave were they? What was the matter with them? You know, I can't believe, you know, four million slaves. This is incredible." And we're right, we're right. We should look back on that with criticism. It is a crushing mark on America's soul. And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery. And I think, what does it take to get us to wake up?

Wake up, that is, and end the 14th Amendment's protection of birthright citizenship.
By now, "abortion as slavery" is a staple Republican sound bite. Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) declared that Planned Parenthood is "a racist organization and it continues to target minorities for abortion destruction." Pro-choice Americans, Ohio legislator Matt Huffman are no different than slave owners. Suggesting that women's control over their own bodies is no different than master over a slave's, Personhood Mississippi compared Roe v. Wade to Dred Scott. And while some Southern Republicans compared health care reform to the "Great War of Yankee Aggression", Louisiana GOP Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao ultimately opposed it over abortion coverage he wrongly claimed was provided by the Affordable Care Act:

"For me abortion is such a moral evil, at a par with slavery, that I cannot in good conscience support a bill that seeks to expand it."

And so it goes.
As next week's Gun Appreciation Day approaches, Larry Ward can take some comfort in knowing he's not alone among those claiming gun control enabled slavery--and worse. Last year, would-be Congressman Joe the Plumber argued that gun curbs were responsible for American slavery and the Nazi Holocaust. (But according to Michele Bachmann and Mike Huckabee, that's crazy talk. After all, gun-control isn't akin to slavery; the U.S. national debt is.) In the meantime, he might want to go see Lincoln and memorize the Great Emancipator's words on slavery from his Second Inaugural of March 4, 1865:

Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."