I had a humanities class. We had to journal what we were reading:
Dating back to the early sixteen hundreds, the black, poor and minorities have been discriminated against for their freedom to bear arms as pertained in the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution of these
Keeping arms away from blacks has always been a concern of the government and lawmakers. The first mention of blacks in gun control law was in Virginia of 1644 where the law barred blacks from owning firearms and the first laws were solely enacted to prevent blacks, poor and the minorities from owning firearms. The first national gun control law that included blacks was in 1792 to disarm the black slaves. This was indeed an insult because these same blacks just ended the fight against the British to free this nation from a tyrannical government. The law served one purpose, that was to deny blacks their right to exercise their second amendment to keep and bear arms. It was ironic that the British tried to enslave the black colonists as well by attempting to disarm them and that the gun laws were legislated to allow the slave owners to hold on to the slaves. Slave owners knew that just like the British that if the black slaves ever gotten arms that there would be an uprising of the slaves against their owners and this fact would have indeed ended slavery in a heartbeat.
Following the Civil War, several legislatures adopted laws and regulations which were known as the “Black Codes”, because faced with a race war and retribution, the sight of a black person with a gun was terrifying to the whites. These laws denied the newly freed men many of the rights that were enjoyed by the white population. In fact that in 1867, the Special Report of the Anti-Slavery Conference noted that under the Black Codes, that blacks were forbidden to own or bear firearms, and thus were rendered defenseless against assaults. By example, the Mississippi Black Code contained the following “Be it enacted…that no freedman, free Negro or mulatto, not in the military.. and not licensed to do by the board of police of his or her county, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition.. and all such arms or ammunition shall be forfeited to the former..”
Legislative intent to disarm blacks can also be found in the voiding of a 1941 conviction of a white man, where a Florida Supreme Court Justice stated that the gun control act was passed for the purpose of disarming the Negro laborers and that it was never intended to be applied to the white population. But blacks aren’t the only ones who legislatures wanted to disarm, in fact in the nineteenth century, southern states also placed restrictions on gun-ownership for certain undesirable whites. For example, the 1911 Sullivan Laws were passed to keep guns out of the hands of immigrants, mainly Italians that during the first three years seventy percent of those arrested had Italian surnames. But why did they single out foreigners, we could see the answers from the pages of the newspapers at the time such as the New York Tribune for example, they said that about pistols found “chiefly in the pockets of ignorant and quarrelsome immigrants of law-breaking low-browed foreigners.”
