What We’ve Overlooked in the Debate About Charleston: The Connection between Guns and Racism

by Guest Sat Jun 27, 2015 5:50 am

Robert McWhirter uses the Constitution and Bill of Rights every day as a practicing criminal lawyer and authority on immigration law and trial advocacy. His vast experience and impressive credentials in the field of law have prepared him for his latest contribution to all American citizens as author of Bill, Quills, and Stills: An Annotated, Illustrated, and Illuminated History of the Bill of Rights (American Bar Association, August 2015). -

The shooting in South Carolina once again showed us the connection of guns and race. Statistics of inner city gun violence always showed the connection. In this context, the National Rifle Association actually believes in gun control. “Nothing” says the NRA should infringe on the right of “law abiding citizens to bear arms.” So, everybody not “law abiding” gets controlled. But does “not law abiding” mean black people? History says yes.

In the late 1960’s the Black Panthers creed was “the gun is the only thing that will free us.” In 1967, they invaded the California State Assembly with guns in hand protesting the Mulford Act, which made it illegal to carry loaded firearms in public. The NRA later supported the Mulford Act and that icon of American conservatism, Governor Ronald Reagan, signed the law stating “I see no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons. …. [The Mulford Act] would work no hardship on the honest citizen." The national Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 and the Gun Control Act of 1968 followed, which the NRA did not oppose. The “not law abiding” blacks got controlled.

But the history goes back further. We associate the American south with guns and consider it the most anti-gun control part of the nation. In reality it was always the most gun controlled. From before the American Revolution until the well after the Civil War slaves couldn’t touch a gun without the master’s permission. Laws prohibited even free blacks from having a gun, a situation that persisted throughout the Jim Crow south well into the twentieth century. This was strict gun control.

A slave with no rights under the law by definition cannot be “law abiding.”

- See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/159799#sthash.owNEkxQ7.dpuf