Stephen Gutowski, Founder of The Reload, said the ACLU’s recent attempt to paint the Second Amendment as racist showcased the group’s move towards further political polarization.

“It’s almost like the ACLU has certain rights that it favors in the Bill of Rights and the Second Amendment was never favored,” he said. “And now it’s basically on an all-out attack on it. And I think this boils down to partisanship. They’ve really become a liberal-identity group.”

Gutowski appeared on The Vince Coglianese Show on WMAL in Washington, D.C. to discuss the most recent episode of the ACLU’s At Liberty podcast where the host and guest claimed multiple times the Second Amendment was created to oppress slaves.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of credibility in the argument itself that’s being put forth,” he said. “For instance, when Vermont adopted its state constitution, it both abolished slavery and it included a provision about gun rights that’s almost identical to the federal constitution. Now, why would they do that if the whole point of the Second Amendment was to allow slave militias to exist in slaveholding states?”

Coglianese and Gutowski discussed the fact that no direct evidence for the idea that the Second Amendment was created to appease southern slaveholders was actually presented in the podcast. Gutowski said the evidence of how the amendment came to be adopted disproves the theory, as does the actual text of the amendment.

“It doesn’t really make any sense,” he said. “And, of course, it goes against the plain meaning of the actual text of the amendment itself.”

The two went on to discuss the ample evidence that racist assertions denying black Americans their humanity and gun-control laws were used to deprive them of their gun rights. They talked about the implications of the racist history of gun control being brought up in a recent brief by an African-American gun group in a Supreme Court case against New York’s restrictive gun-carry law.

You can listen to the full interview below: