I am sure everyone reading this knows the pervasive stereotype of the gun-owning community as an insular cadre of middle-aged White men with violent tendencies and discriminatory views. By portraying us as a band of resentful racists, anti–Second Amendment activists effectively shut down any opposition to their ideology. They no longer need to engage in substantive debate because they force us to waste our effort and resources disproving the stereotype. The great irony of the whole situation is that, far from being a force for social justice, gun control has historically been a tool of oppression against society’s most vulnerable and marginalized. Apropos of February being Black History Month, now is an opportune time to reflect on this phenomenon. Of course, I fully recognize the irony of me, a White man, writing on this topic, but I feel the need to make the point that the tradition of gun control is a tradition of victimizing minorities, particularly African Americans.
The first gun control laws in American history predate the United States’ foundation as an independent country. In the 17th and 18th centuries, colonial and state governments passed a multitude of laws to restrict and outright prohibit Native Americans and especially African Americans from owning and carrying firearms. In some places, members of these already-disenfranchised groups were banned from carrying weapons of any kind. Without arms, it was more difficult for Native Americans to resist settlers’ encroachment into their territory and for enslaved African Americans to revolt against slaveholders.
Even after the United States became an independent country, the discriminatory gun control continued. Anyone who studies U.S. history is painfully aware of the rampant, legally enforced discrimination against ethnic minorities throughout. While our Declaration of Independence proudly espouses the basic humanist principle that “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” the unfortunate reality is that not all Americans were afforded equal protection under the law. Among the first of those unalienable rights to be revoked for second-class citizens was that to keep and bear arms. In some areas in the 19th century, vigilante patrols were permitted and even encouraged to raid free Black citizens’ homes to confiscate their firearms and enact summary punishment.
The passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments forced state legislatures to change their strategy if they wanted to continue selectively disarming African Americans. Beginning with Tennessee in 1870, a series of Jim Crow laws banned the sale of inexpensive handguns and imposed additional taxes and fees on firearm transfers (sound familiar?), making firearm ownership financially impossible for many recently freed former slaves and their families. Some states outright banned the sale of all handguns other than the relatively expensive Army and Navy revolvers; even California’s handgun roster pales in comparison.
Around the same time, state governments also began to impose may-issue laws, giving local authorities broad discretion to deny carry permits with no justification. Such laws allowed racist or corrupt government officials to arbitrarily abridge the right to self-defense with no need for any written discriminatory policies and the associated legal scrutiny. The resulting power disparity in the Jim Crow South enabled the Ku Klux Klan to ravage Black communities with near impunity, especially as local law enforcement often turned a blind eye to such activities.
Racially targeted gun control continued through the 20th century, largely under the guise of public safety. Further bans on inexpensive handguns and additional taxes and fees imposed on firearm transactions disproportionately affected ethnic minorities, particularly in urban areas. May-issue laws became widespread and continued to allow arbitrary, unjustified denial of concealed handgun permits even to citizens who met every written requirement. Even after Martin Luther King Jr.’s house was bombed in 1956 in retaliation for the Montgomery bus boycott, his application for a concealed handgun permit was denied despite the demonstrable threat to his life. California’s backslide into repressive gun control began with the Mulford Act of 1967, outlawing open carry and establishing the state’s may-issue permitting system, which then-Governor Ronald Reagan enacted in response to an armed but peaceful demonstration by the Black Panther Party at the state capitol.
Today, many anti-gun groups point out that African Americans are victims of firearm homicide at disproportionately high per-capita rates, and use that fact the justify more gun control. Where their logic breaks down is that most of the murderers killing young Black men in particular at egregious rates obtain their firearms illegally, something many of the popular gun-control proposals fail to address. Instead, we tend to see hardware bans and carry restrictions, which don’t stop those criminals but disarm honest people. The result is a vicious circle of increasingly restrictive laws further denying potential victims the most effective deterrent and defensive tools available, while grossly inadequate and improper enforcement of existing laws allows repeat offenders to continue the cycle of violence.
It should be noted that in recent years, Americans have made great strides in choking out racist attitudes and the laws they inspired. Half the states in the country now allow constitutional carry, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in NYSRPA v. Bruen nominally enforces shall-issue in the rest. That said, however, our work is not done; many old racist gun control laws are still on the books. The 1968 Gun Control Act, for example, restricts the importation of handguns according to a set of bizarre and arbitrary criteria intended to cut off the supply of inexpensive handguns manufactured abroad and popular at the time among economically disadvantaged Black citizens.
As the popular saying goes, gun control has nothing to do with guns and everything to do with control. To be armed is to have the power to enforce one’s own will, or to prevent others from enforcing their will against the individual. Since the advent of organized government millennia ago, tyrants have maintained their power in part by restricting the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Our own country’s history is marred by centuries of gun control that served to take away that power from disfavored minorities, particularly the Black community. The sooner the rest of America wakes up to these basic historical patterns and pushes to break them, the better off we all will be.
