(Excerpted from the NRA-ILA "War Against Handgun Fact Sheet")
In the United States, the first efforts to prevent the ownership
of firearms, in particular, handguns, were aimed at Blacks. The
French Black Code (1751) required Louisiana colonists to stop and,
"if necessary," beat "any black carrying any potential weapon. . . ."
After Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, the Virginia legislature made
it illegal for free blacks "to keep or carry any firelock of any
kind, any military weapon, or any powder or lead." In 1834, Tennessee
revised Article XI, Section 26 of its Constitution to read "That the
free white men of this State have a right to keep and bear arms for
their common defense," inserting the words "free white men" to
replace "freemen," whose rights were protected when the Constitution
was ratified in 1796. (Clayton E. Cramer, "The Racist Roots of Gun
Control," Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy, Winter
1995.)
Mass production techniques lowered the cost of many products,
including firearms. After the Civil War, gun prices fell within the
budgets of average citizens, including former slaves who, having been
freed, were entitled to exercise the right to arms, long considered
one of the features distinguishing citizenship from servitude. The
Supreme Court had ruled in Dred Scott v. Sanford (19 How. 393, 1857),
"It (citizenship) would give to persons of the negro race, who were
recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to
enter every other State whenever they pleased. . . and it would give
them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all
subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public
meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever
they went."
To prevent Blacks from arming themselves, southern states enacted
the Black Codes, which "fixed the black population in serfdom,
denying all political rights, excluding them from virtually any
chance at economic or social advancement -- and, of course,
forbidding them to own arms." (Don B. Kates, Jr., "Toward a History
of Handgun Prohibition in the United States," Restricting Handguns:
The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out, Don B. Kates, Jr., Ed., North River
Press, Inc, 1979.)
After ratification of the 14th Amendment (1868) and enactment of
the Civil Rights Act (1875), several states responded by passing laws
which on their face were race-neutral, but which in effect were not.
Attorney Robert Dowlut observed, "It does not matter that a law on
its face applies to all. A law will be deemed unconstitutional if the
'the reality is that the law's impact falls on the minority.'"
("Bearing Arms in State Bills of Rights, Judicial Interpretation, and
Public Housing," St. Thomas Law Review, Vol. 5, Fall 1992.)
Among these laws, the forerunners of so-called "Saturday Night
Special" legislation, was Tennessee's "Army and Navy" law (1879),
which prohibited the sale of any "belt or pocket pistols, or
revolvers, or any other kind of pistols, except army or navy pistol"
models, among the most expensive, and largest, handguns of the day.
(Such as the Colt Model 1960 Army, Model 1851 Navy, and Model 1861
Navy percussion cap revolvers, or Model 1873 Single-Action Army
revolver.) The law thus prohibited small two-shot derringers and
low-caliber rimfire revolvers, the handguns that most Blacks could
afford.
20th Century Anti-Handgun Efforts in the U.S.
In 1911, New York passed the Sullivan Law, which to this day
requires a person to obtain a license, issued at the discretion of
police officials, to possess a handgun. The law was aimed at
preventing handgun ownership by Italians and Irish immigrants of the
period, then considered untrustworthy by New York legislators and
police chiefs with different bloodlines. The National Firearms Act
(1934), as originally proposed, would have required registration of
handguns.
In 1968, Congress passed the Gun Control Act, ostensibly in
reaction to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator
Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. But even
supporters of "gun control" have recognized another purpose to the
law. Robert Sherrill wrote, "The Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed
not to control guns but to control blacks.... Inasmuch as the
legislation finally passed in 1968 had nothing to do with the guns
used in the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, it seems
reasonable to assume that the law was directed at that other threat
of the 1960s, more omnipresent than the political assassin -- namely,
the black rioter....With the horrendous rioting of 1967 and 1968,
Congress again was panicked toward passing some law that would shut
off weapons access to blacks." (The Saturday Night Special, 1973.) B.
Bruce-Briggs similarly noted, "It is difficult to escape the
conclusion that the 'Saturday night special' is emphasized because it
is cheap and is being sold to a particular class of people. The name
is sufficient evidence -- the reference is to 'n-----town Saturday
Night.'" ("The Great American Gun War," The Public Interest, Fall
1976.)
More recently, anti-handgun efforts have included laws or
legislative proposals for registration, licensing, limits on the
frequency of purchases, limits on the capacity of ammunition
magazines, bans on both small handguns ("Saturday Night Specials")
and large handguns ("assault pistols"), and requirements that
handguns (except those of the police) either be externally locked
(rendering them useless for protection) or manufactured with
non-existent internal devices to prevent the handgun from being used
by anyone other than its rightful owner.
Conspicuously, the race-oriented history of "gun control" laws has
escaped the attention of many in the civil rights community. Legal
scholars Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond have written, "The
history of blacks, firearms regulations, and the right to bear arms
should cause us to ask new questions regarding the Second Amendment.
. . . Perhaps a re-examination of this history can lead us to a
modern realization of what the framers of the Second Amendment
understood: that it is unwise to place the means of protection
totally in the hands of the state, and that self-defense is also a
civil right. ("The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist
Reconsideration," Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and
Explorations on the Second Amendment, ed., Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey, School of Law, 1994.)
