Gun control laws and racism: tools historically used to disempower US blacks, Irish & other minorities

Many good historical examples in this New American article hint at a plausible reason for us having such a great proliferation of guns in the United States and for open carry laws that are clearly meant to be used by whites but never blacks. Historical fact shows that American political authorities clearly never intended for blacks to be authorized to own or carry guns and over many decades, laws specifically barring ethnic minority individuals (like blacks, Irish and Scots) from ownership were put in place. When black people attained full citizenship and voting rights, the strategy of barring them from gun ownership didn’t work any more. Is that when whites changed to a strategy of stockpiling such huge arsenals of personal firearms that they can outgun all other owners?

In the history of gun control elsewhere across the globe, there have been many examples of genocide where the victim race or ethnic group has been disarmed before the genocide took place. One particularly valuable scholarly analysis of this trend was the 1994 book Lethal Laws by Jay Simkin, Alan Rice, and Aaron Zelman, which analyzed the gun control laws of six national genocides. In each of the six cases, from the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians to the Nazi annihilation of the Jews to the Rwandan Hutus killing the Tutsis, strict gun control laws were in place for the victim populations before the genocide. America avoided genocide, but historically its gun control laws served a similar racist purpose by subjugating African-Americans legally and leaving them to the ravages of terrorist organizations such as the Red Shirts and the Ku Klux Klan.

Hat tip to Nathaniel Davis for sharing this excellent and thought-provoking article.