Swastikas on his guns

[sir pball]

12. Most of the blame lies with my many-times-great-granduncle, Morrison Waite.

He was the Chief Justice who authored the Cruikshank opinion, which effectively ended Reconstruction by ruling that the Bill of Rights, explicitly including the 1st, 2nd, and 14th Amendments, was only applicable to the Federal government - not States or individuals. It threw out the convictions of the perpetrators of the Colfax Massacre and left the Southern States free to decline any further prosecution of hate crimes. And it was held as precedent for over a century – oddly enough, it was the 2010 McDonald gun rights decision that finally neutered it.

A real low point in American history and a huge black mark on my family history.