Below is an excerpt discussing some of the history of racist gun laws. Feel free to research and read the entire article.
BLACK GUNS MATTER!!!
Racist Gun Laws and the Second Amendment
Symposium Essay by
Adam Winkler
JUN 21, 2022
135 Harv. L. Rev. F. 537
For a significant portion of American history, gun laws bore the ugly taint of racism.
1×1. On the racist history of gun laws, see generally Clayton E. Cramer,
The Racist Roots of Gun Control, KAN. J.L. & PUB. POL’Y, Winter 1995, at 17 (arguing that American gun laws were designed to disempower racial minorities); and Robert J. Cottrol & Raymond T. Diamond,
The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, 80 GEO. L.J. 309, 333–42 (1991) (outlining the ways in which American gun control specifically restricted Black Americans’ access to guns).Show More The founding generation that wrote the Second Amendment had racist gun laws, including prohibitions on the possession or carrying of firearms by Black people, whether free or enslaved.
2×2.
See Cramer,
supra note 1, at 18. A Florida law in 1825 authorized white people to “enter into all Negro houses” and “lawfully seize and take away all such arms, weapons, and ammunition.”
3×3. 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).Show More In
Dred Scott v. Sandford,
4×4. 60 U.S. 393 (1857). 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.”
5×5.
Id. at 417. After the Civil War, the Black Codes enacted in the South made it a crime for a Black person to have a gun.
6×6. Cottrol & Diamond,
supra note 1, at 344. Even facially neutral laws were used in a racially discriminatory fashion; Martin Luther King Jr. was denied a concealed carry permit even after his house was firebombed.
7×7. ADAM WINKLER, GUNFIGHT: THE BATTLE OVER THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS IN AMERICA 235 (2011).Show More For much of American history, gun rights did not extend to Black people and gun control was often enacted to limit access to guns by people of color.