(Original Image: Second Amendment Institute)
“A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” — Ida B. Wells
"The historical record provides compelling evidence that racism underlies gun control laws—and not in any subtle way," — historian Clayton Cramer, 1995
As early as the 1600s, colonies had rules and laws on the books that barred African Americans from owning firearms. For example, Virginia prohibited black people, whether free or enslaved, from carrying weapons.
A 1825 law in Florida authorized white people to “enter into all Negro houses” and “lawfully seize and take away all such arms, weapons, and ammunition.”(1) In Dred Scott v. Sandford, Chief Justice Roger Taney argued that one reason Black people could not be citizens under the Constitution was that it “would give to persons of the negro race” the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”
After the 1831 slave uprising led by Nat Turner, Virginia reinforced its ban of Blacks carrying firearms, and Tennessee revised its constitutional guarantee of the right to arms, restricting it to "free white men."
Even after the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification, many states implemented facially neutral gun control laws with a clear intent that they be stringently enforced in a discriminatory manner against disfavored populations like immigrants and African-Americans (Heritage Foundation).
Consider the words of a Florida Supreme Court Justice in a 1941 concurring opinion that analyzed a Reconstruction Era handgun licensing law:
The same condition existed when the Act was amended in 1901 and the Act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers….The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied. We have no statistics available, but it is a safe guess to assume that more than 80% of the white men living in rural sections of Florida have violated this statute…[but there has] never been, within my knowledge, any effort to enforce the provisions of this statute as to white people.
After the Civil War, the Black Codes (1865-1866) enacted in the South made it a crime for a Black person to have a gun.
Fast forward a century later in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was denied a concealed carry permit even after his house was firebombed.
The facts presented above provide substantial incontrovertible evidence that our nations history of gun control is deeply rooted in racism.
(1) Robert J. Cottrol & Raymond T. Diamond, The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, in Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and Explorations on the Second Amendment 403, 403 (Robert J. Cottrol ed., 1994).
