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We certainly can.Gun control advocates should stop wasting our time, you don’t have the votes to have it your way to use the force of government.Gun advocates have history and the constitution on there side.First the Constitution:2/3rds Majorities in Both houses of Congress signed by the President and ratified by 2/3rds of the states is needed to repeal the second amendment to US Constitution. Gun Control is about political repression by government.Second The History of gun control in AmericaGun Control in America is a legacy of the disenfranchisement of African Americans by the Democratic party in the post Civil War Era.The Racist Origin of America’s Gun Control LawsWritten by Thomas R. Eddlemfont size decrease font size increase font size Print EmailThe Racist Origin of America’s Gun Control LawsA freed slave and tenant farmer, Roda Ann Childs of Griffin, Georgia, testified on September 25, 1866 before the Freedman’s Bureau in her state of what happened when eight armed men barged into her home one evening:We were called upon one night, and my husband was demanded; I said he was not there. They then asked where he was. I said he was gone to the watermelon patch. They then seized me and took me some distance from the house, where they “bucked” me down across a log, stripped my clothes over my head, one of the men standing astride my neck, and beat me across my posterior, two men holding my legs. In this manner I was beaten until they were tired. Then they turned me parallel with the log, laying my neck on a limb which projected from the log, and one man placing his foot upon my neck, beat me again on my hip and thigh. Then I was thrown upon the ground on my back, one of the men stood upon my breast, while two others took hold of my feet and stretched my limbs as far apart as they could, while the man standing upon my breast applied the strap to my private parts until fatigued into stopping, and I was more dead than alive. Then a man, supposed to be an ex-confederate soldier, as he was on crutches, fell upon me and ravished me. During the whipping one of the men ran his pistol into me, and said he had a hell of a mind to pull the trigger, and swore they ought to shoot me, as my husband had been in the “God d***ed Yankee Army,” and swore they meant to kill every black son-of-a-b***h they could find that had ever fought against them. They then went back to the house, seized my two daughters and beat them, demanding their father’s pistol, and upon failure to get that, they entered the house and took such articles of clothing as suited their fancy, and decamped.Mrs. Childs’ husband had been entitled to own a gun as a soldier in the Union army during the war, but pre-war Georgia law had banned even free blacks from owning guns. Such laws threatened to leave millions of newly freed slaves to the ravages of savage men, some of whom worked with local police, others who worked openly in unofficial gangs, and still others who worked secretly behind the white sheets of the Ku Klux Klan.Already by 1866, the carnage suffered by black Americans was massive, numbering in the thousands across the former slave states. Former Mississippi Provisional Governor William L. Sharkey — a pre-war Supreme Court judge in the state and unionist during the war — testified before Congress in 1866, “I believe that there are now in the State very little over half the number of freedmen that there were formerly of slaves — certainly not more than two-thirds. They have died off. There is no telling the mortality that has prevailed among them; they have died off in immense numbers.” Sharkey — whose numbers are clearly exaggerated unless they include refugees who fled the state — concluded to Congress, “My expectation concerning them is that they are destined to extinction, beyond all doubt. We must judge of the future by the past. I could tell you a great many circumstances to that effect; I am sorry I did not come prepared with means to state the percentages of deaths among them. It is alarming, appalling. I think they will gradually die out.”Sharkey — who had been appointed governor by President Andrew Johnson and elected in 1865 to the U.S. Senate by Mississippi (but not seated because the Reconstructionist Congress refused to seat congressmen from confederate states) — wasn’t the only one to predict extermination of African-Americans in the postwar environment. Rev. Joseph E. Roy of the American Home Missionary Society told Congress of his six-month-long mission across the South after the war: “I heard very many persons remark, with great satisfaction, that the negroes would become extinct in a few years,” including many people willing to do the job themselves.That “extinction” could only take place if the armed African-Americans who had been in Union army service were first disarmed, a movement well under way by the time of Mrs. Childs’ brutal rape. South Carolina Freedman’s Bureau official Assistant Commissioner Rufux Saxton testified before Congress in 1866 that he also had documented numerous attempts by white supremacist gangs, calling themselves “regulators,” roving about South Carolina to disarm black freedmen. “I have had men come to my office and complain that the negroes had arms, and I also heard that [a] band of men called Regulators, consisting of those who had been in the late confederate service, were going around the country disarming negroes. I can further state that they desired me to sanction a form of contract that would deprive the colored men of their arms, which I refused to do.”America’s First Racist Gun Control LawsThe very first gun control laws in America were slave codes that banned African-Americans from owning or bearing arms. As early as 1640, the Virginia legislature passed an ordinance stating that African-American slaves — then numbering fewer than 300 in the British colony — would be exempt from mandatory militia service. The Virginia slave code of 1680 made disarmament of all black people mandatory, ruling, “It shall not be lawfull for any negroe or other slave to carry or arme himselfe with any club, staffe, gunn, sword or any other weapon of defence or offence,” a prohibition repeated in the 1705 Virginia slave code, written in more modern language, requiring that “no slave go armed with gun, sword, club, staff, or other weapon.”The prohibition against slaves owning or carrying guns or other weapons in Britain’s American colonies preceded other gun control laws across the British empire, including the penal laws against the Irish, which in 1695 required that “All papists [Catholics] within this kingdom of Ireland shall before the 1st day of March, 1696, deliver up to some justice of the peace or corporation officer where such papist shall dwell, all their arms and ammunition, notwithstanding any licence for keeping the same heretofore granted.”The rules against owning guns were aimed not just at those nominally deemed “slaves” in America; they were aimed at all subjected peoples. The text of Virginia’s first slave code applied the same restriction to “free” blacks and indentured servants (mostly Irish Catholics and Scotch Presbyterians, but also criminals). Nearly all other Southern slave-holding states copied Virginia’s lead, passing laws banning the ownership of guns for both slave and free African-Americans. These laws stayed in effect and were updated after independence from Britain. Georgia’s 1833 slave code required that “the free persons of color, so detected in owning, using or carrying fire-arms, shall receive on his bare back, thirty-nine lashes.” Alabama’s 1833 slave code was nearly identical, with exactly the same punishment. North Carolina’s 1855 slave code simply stated: “No slave shall go armed with gun, sword, club or other weapon, or shall keep any such weapon.” The state omitted the mention of free blacks, largely because North Carolina had so few free African-Americans.Texas may have been alone among slave states not to pass an outright ban on slaves bearing arms, perhaps in part due to legislative fidelity to the 1836 state constitution that mandates, “Every citizen shall have the right to bear arms in defence of himself and the republic.” Though blacks were not considered citizens in antebellum Texas, the legislature was assumed not to have the power to pass legislation prohibiting any ownership of guns.The reason slave codes denied the right to keep and bear arms to slaves is easily understandable. The whites feared the slaves would rebel. Arming slaves may have led to a revolution the slave-masters did not want. But that didn’t explain the ban on free blacks owning guns. The deeper purpose behind the ban on owning and bearing arms was to take away any thought that those people had individual rights. And it went far beyond the practical denial of a long-held individual right among Anglo-American people; the deeper issue had to do with placing the master as a god above the slave, with the power of life and death.This point was brought home in the 1830 case of North Carolina v. Mann, when the Supreme Court of North Carolina defended the right of a master who had shot his slave named Lydia while she was trying to run away. The case established that slavery was less about labor than about dehumanizing power. “The slave, to remain a slave,” Justice Thomas Ruffin wrote in his decision, “must be made sensible, that there is no appeal from his master; that his power is in no instance, usurped; but is conferred by the laws of man at least, if not by the law of God.” The words of Ruffin blasphemously perverted the words of St. Paul in Chapter 13 of his Letter to the Romans: “Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God … for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God’s minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil.”Ruffin hadn’t really made any innovation of law in the antebellum South, as laws in many states implicitly — and sometimes explicitly — gave masters the power of life and death over their slaves. For example, Virginia’s slave code of 1705 stipulated that “if any slave resist his master, or owner, or other person, by his or her order, correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction, it shall not be accounted felony; but the master, owner, and every such other person so giving correction, shall be free and acquit of all punishment and accusation for the same, as if such accident had never happened.” In early America, slavery quickly came to be divided between traditional slavery practiced in almost every nation and culture — what the English sometimes called “indentured servitude” and today is called “white slavery” — and the “chattel” slavery that bound African-Americans. The distinction became a gulf by the mid-1700s, as indentured servants traditionally had some rights and were generally only bound for a limited time (and this system was abolished after the War for Independence from Britain). African-American “chattel” slavery — a word that means “moveable property” and is derived from the English word “cattle” — was for the life of the slaves and all of their descendants. In such a system, it was vital the slave-owner be the only one bearing the “sword,” and to be the god-figure with the power of life and death over the slave.The ban on ownership of guns by nominally free African-Americans in most states had the same purpose as slavery. In essence, a ban on ownership of weapons is the ultimate badge of slavery and inferiority to the higher power that bears the “sword.” Whether it was the “free” African-Americans in Virginia or the Irish tenant under penal laws as an indentured servant, the purpose behind gun control was to keep them in a state of slavery with or without the name.Establishing the right to keep and bear arms was a key fight in the Anglo-American tradition, and an important part of the English Bill of Rights signed by William of Orange in 1689. That document stipulated “the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.” The document was a predecessor of the U.S. Second Amendment, the former passed in part because the deposed Catholic King James II had deprived some Protestants of weapons. The British Bill of Rights complained James II had caused “several good subjects being Protestants to be disarmed at the same time when papists were both armed and employed contrary to law.”Persons possessing rights have historically been capable of owning and bearing arms, while slaves have not. The complete subjugation of all blacks — whether “free” or slave — was driven home by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney in the infamous Dred Scott case in 1856. Taney stressed in his Dred Scott v. Sandford opinion that if African-Americans could be admitted as citizens in any state, “It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right … to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Taney correctly noted that even in some Northern U.S. states, blacks were denied the right to keep and bear arms. “By the laws of New Hampshire, collected and finally passed in 1815,” Taney wrote, “no one was permitted to be enrolled in the militia of the State but free white citizens, and the same provision is found in a subsequent collection of the laws made in 1855. Nothing could more strongly mark the entire repudiation of the African race.” Not surprisingly, blacks had few rights in those Northern states before the Civil War — being without the right to keep and bear arms — and were reduced in many instances to a state of near-slavery.In his Dred Scott opinion, Taney also claimed, falsely, that African-Americans were denied both citizenship and the right to keep and bear arms in every state, a point Associate Justice Benjamin Curtis refuted in his dissent. Taney wrote of blacks in his decision: “We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.”But the reality was that blacks were considered full citizens in Massachusetts before adoption of the U.S. Constitution, and in Vermont as soon as it joined the union. Shortly after Massachusetts ratified its 1780 constitution declaring that “all men are born free and equal,” the state courts were beset with slaves demanding their freedom under that provision of the constitution.The state constitution deemed them “free and equal,” protecting for them all the rights possessed by white people, including both the right to vote and the right to keep and bear arms. In fact, Revolutionary War veteran and freed slave Toby Gilmore owned a cannon on his Raynham, Massachusetts, farm and, according to local tradition, publicly fired it off during annual Fourth of July celebrations. Gil­more’s cannon — which stands as a thundering refutation of today’s gun control lobby argument that the Founding Fathers did not intend the Second Amendment to protect citizen ownership of “military-style assault weapons” — currently resides in the Old Colony Historical Society in Taunton, Massachusetts.Black Codes After the Civil WarEven after abolition of slavery with the 13th Amendment, racist gun control laws were used to keep African-Americans in a state of subjugation. Across the former Confederate states, reconstituted legislatures in 1865 passed laws designed to reduce the status of African-Americans back to slaves without the name. These laws became known as the “Black Codes,” and even some of the Northern states — such as Oregon — enforced Black Codes for decades. In the South, many of the old slave codes were simply re-enacted, with the word “slave” struck out and “negro” or “freeman” inserted. Most also passed apprenticeship and vagrancy laws that placed African-Americans in long-term, forced agricultural contracts unless they carried work papers with a plantation.Even their right to freedom of worship was taken from them under the infamous Black Codes. Ever since the abortive Gabriel Prosser slave revolt in Virginia in 1800, organized under the auspices of religious meetings, slave codes restricted black people’s religious gatherings. Mississippi’s Black Codes of 1865 likewise prohibited African-Americans from “exercising the function of a minister of the Gospel without a license from some regularly organized church.” Freedman’s Bureau Assistant Commissioner Thomas Conway testified to Congress on February 22, 1866 that in Louisiana, religious meetings were often broken up under a similar law that banned religious meetings after 9:00 in the evening: “There was an order issued at all the station-houses of the city, that the police in their various beats should break up any meetings of colored people held after 9 o’clock, and in some places meetings were broken up and the worshipers were all carried off to jail. This was done violently, and, on account of it, the city was almost reduced to a state of riot and revolution, the colored people having been unwilling to endure the persecution.”But there was no armed resistance, since only the white population possessed guns. And the recently freed population of ex-slaves were often slaughtered by new secret societies bent on terrorism and murder, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White Leagues (and after 1875, the less secret Red Shirts).Mississippi’s Black Codes provided a $10 fine (about $650 in today’s money) for black ownership or possession of guns, but in Florida the penalty for an African-American owning a gun was positively medieval. Florida stipulated that black gun owners would be required to “stand in the pillory … for one hour, and then whipped with thirty-nine lashes on the bare back.” Thirty-nine lashes was also the standard penalty under slave codes in many of the Southern states for gun ownership. South Carolina also prescribed “corporal punishment” for blacks owning guns.Even African-American soldiers on duty in the U.S. Army were subject to persecution under the Black Codes. Conway also testified of vagrancy laws: “In the city of New Orleans last summer [1865], under the orders of the acting mayor of the city, Hugh Kennedy, the police of that city conducted themselves toward the freedmen, in respect to violence and ill usage, in every way equal to the old days of slavery; arresting them on the streets as vagrants, without any form of law whatever, and simply because they did not have in their pockets certificates of employment from their former owners or other white citizens. I have gone to the jails and released large numbers of them, men who were industrious and who had regular employment; yet because they had not the certificates of white men in their pockets they were locked up in jail to be sent out to plantations.... Some members of the seventy-fourth United States colored infantry, a regiment which was mustered out but one day, were arrested the next because they did not have these certificates of employment. This was done to these men after having served in the United States army three years.”Some Relief Under the 14th AmendmentWhen the 14th Amendment was declared ratified in 1868 (the reconstructionist Congress forced former Confederate states to ratify it as a condition of renewing congressional representation), the Black Codes — including the race-based prohibition of keeping and bearing arms — became instantly unconstitutional. The amendment granted citizenship to blacks and stipulated that no state could “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”The amendment required at least nominal equality under the law, but attempts to prohibit black citizens from obtaining firearms for their self-defense continued under new Jim Crow laws. Dubbed “separate but equal” by its proponents, only the first half of the proposition under Jim Crow was ever designed to be true. The new racist laws in many states took on a nominally even-handed appearance, even though they were designed to subjugate black Americans. In order to stop blacks from voting, a literacy test was enacted in many of the Southern states where it had been a crime for decades to teach slaves how to read. And to ensure that illiterate whites could continue to vote uninterrupted, the same legislatures enacted the “grandfather clause.” The grandfather clause stated that if a person or his father or grandfather could vote in the United States before 1860, they wouldn’t have to take the literacy test in order to vote. In other words, the literacy test would only apply to blacks.That’s how Jim Crow worked toward disarming black Americans. A year after Homer Plessy, who was black, was arrested for boarding a segregated white train car in Louisiana in the famous case that eventually added a Supreme Court imprimatur upon Jim Crow, Florida passed a law that incorporated gun control into Jim Crow by prohibiting the carrying of handguns and repeating rifles without a license. And just as Homer Plessy paid extra for a ticket to the first-class car and was told there was no first-class car for African-Americans, the “separate but equal” gun control laws were likewise only half true because they weren’t applied equally. Florida Justice Rivers Buford’s concurring opinion Watson v. Stone (1941) stated of the 1893 law: “The original act was passed when there was a great influx of Negro laborers … and the Act was passed for the purpose of disarming the Negro laborers.... The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied.” The law was set aside in the 1941 Florida court decision, but not because of its racism.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 andThe Dark Secret of Jim Crow and the Racist Roots of Gun ControlThe Dark Secret of Jim Crow and the Racist Roots of Gun ControlBy Dave KopelAmerica's 1st Freedom, March 2011. More articles by Kopel on civil rights and gun control are available here.Jim Crow is alive and well.School children today are taught that "Jim Crow" was the name for a legal system of racial oppression, which began after Reconstruction, particularly in the South, and reached its nadir in the early 20th century. Children are also taught that Jim Crow was banished by legal reforms such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.Yet in one important part of American life, Jim Crow continues to thrive--the legal foundation of restrictive and oppressive gun control that was built by Jim Crow. The Jim Crow cases continue to hobble the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.Shockingly, the Jim Crow laws and legacy are lauded by some persons who consider themselves liberal and tolerant. In the 2010 Supreme Court case McDonald v. Chicago, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent that asserted that District of Columbia v. Heller should be overturned, and that state and local governments should be allowed to ban guns. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the dissent. That dissent included a litany of restrictive American gun control statutes and court cases, many of them the products of Jim Crow.Previous issues of America's 1st Freedom have told the story of how the defeated Confederate states enacted the Black Codes, which explicitly restricted gun possession and carrying by the freedmen. Sometimes these laws facilitated the activities of the terrorist organization Ku Klux Klan, America's first gun control organization. The top item on the Klan's agenda was confiscating arms from the freedmen, the better to terrorize them afterward.Outraged, the Reconstruction Congress responded with the Freedmen's Bureau Bill, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1870--every one of them aimed at racial subordination in general and racist gun control laws in particular.President Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77), who would later serve as president of the National Rifle Association, vigorously prosecuted Klansmen, and even declared martial law when necessary to suppress KKK violence.Reconstruction formally ended in 1877 with the inauguration of President Rutherford B. Hayes and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. Even before that, white supremacist "redeemer" governments had taken over one Southern state after another.Because the new 14th Amendment forbade any state to deny "the equal protection of the laws," gun control statutes aimed at blacks could no longer be written in overtly racial terms. Instead, the South created racially neutral laws designed to disarm freedmen. Some laws prohibited inexpensive firearms while protecting more expensive military guns owned by former Confederate soldiers. Meanwhile, other laws imposed licensing systems or carry restrictions. As a Florida Supreme Court justice later acknowledged, these laws were "never intended to be applied to the white population" (Watson v. Stone, 1941).Southern courts generally upheld these laws. In the 19th and 20th centuries, these court precedents played a substantial role in maintaining white supremacy by facilitating unofficial--but government-tolerated--violence against blacks and civil rights advocates. Today, these racist laws are the foundation of continuing infringements of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.Let's take a state-by-state look at how the system worked--and continues to work.TennesseeSetting a pattern that was typical in the South, Tennessee courts initially protected the right to arms, but then abandoned the field as Jim Crow took over. In 1870, the Tennessee Legislature prohibited the carrying of "a dirk, sword-cane, Spanish stiletto, belt or pocket pistol or revolver," either openly or concealed. The Tennessee Supreme Court addressed the ban in the well-known and still-influential 1871 case, Andrews v. State.The Andrews court stated that people had a right to arms, including the right to buy guns and ammunition, to take guns to gunsmiths and to carry guns and ammunition for purposes of sale and repair.The court rejected the notion that the right to arms was a "political right," like voting or jury service, which belonged to only a subset of the people. Rather, the right to arms was a civil right to be enjoyed by all citizens.The right to carry in public could be regulated, but not prohibited: "The power to regulate does not fairly mean the power to prohibit; on the contrary, to regulate necessarily involves the existence of the thing or act to be regulated."In this particular case, Andrews had been carrying a repeating pistol (what we would today call a large revolver). The legislature could not ban the carrying of this type of arm, which was particularly useful for militia service: "The pistol known as the repeater is a soldier's weapon--skill in the use of which will add to the efficiency of the soldier. If such is the character of the weapon here designated, then the prohibition of the statute is too broad to be allowed to stand. ..."The legislature, however, was determined to stamp out the right to carry. So it promptly passed a new law banning the carrying of any handgun "other than an army pistol, or such as are commonly carried and used in the United States Army, and in no case shall it be lawful for any person to carry such army pistol publicly or privately about his person in any other manner than openly in his hands."The new statute contradicted Andrews' affirmation of the right to buy any type of handgun in a store and carry it home. The law still allowed any model of handgun to be taken home, but the buyer would have to put the gun in a cart or wagon, rather than carry it. While the law allowed the carrying--for any purpose, and in public--of army model handguns, the requirement that the gun be carried "in his hands" was likely to provoke fear and almost certain to cause accidents. In effect, the law went as far as possible to outlaw all handgun possession while maintaining a pretense of honoring the right to bear arms.Unfortunately, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the ban without even discussing whether the law violated the Andrews standard (State v. Wilburn, 1872).Then in 1879, the legislature banned the sale of all handguns "except army or navy pistols." The obvious effect was to prevent freedmen from owning handguns. Almost all were poor and could not afford the expensive Army and Navy models. Meanwhile, the ex-confederate soldiers already had plenty of Army and Navy models that they had been allowed to take home under the surrender terms for the Confederate army.ArkansasLike Tennessee, Arkansas had an unusual constitutional right to arms, which guaranteed the right only for the "common defense"--this was the basis for limiting the right only to militia-type arms. Notably, when the U.S. Senate was considering the Second Amendment, it had rejected Sen. Roger Sherman's proposal to impose a similar limit on the federal right to arms.As Reconstruction was ending, the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld broad gun controls while still respecting core rights. But as Jim Crow spread its tentacles, Arkansas degenerated into near-nullification of the right.The 1876 decision Fife v. state held that a ban on open or concealed carry of pistols was too broad. Citing the Tennessee case Andrews v. State, the Arkansas Supreme Court held that only militia-type arms were protected and that the right to carry militia arms belonged to all people, not just militiamen. The court held that "the rifle, of all descriptions, the shot gun, the musket and repeater, are such arms, and ... under the Constitution, the right to keep such arms cannot be infringed or forbidden by the legislature."While large handguns ("repeaters") were protected, the "pocket revolver" was not, because the pocket revolver was not "effective as a weapon of war." The court overlooked the point that the "common defense" is enhanced by personal self-defense, because responsible gun ownership and self-defense against criminals deter crime in general, aid the police and make the public at large safer.Consistent with the Fife case, the Arkansas court later struck down convictions for carrying concealed army pistols. (Wilson v. State and Holland v. state, both in 1878.) Wilson held that carrying handguns in the course of one's daily activities in ordinary public places (but not in churches or polling places) was a constitutional right.The remedy to abuse of the right was not prohibition against the innocent but punishment of the guilty: "If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege."But the Arkansas Legislature would not quit. The carrying of most handguns was already outlawed. Then in 1881 the legislature copied the Tennessee law and banned "the carrying of army pistols except uncovered and in the hand."The next year, the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the "in the hand" requirement in Haile v. State. Ignoring the court's own precedents, and relying on the "common defense" language in the state constitution, the court said that the right to arms was not for personal defense, but solely for the resistance of tyranny.The court acknowledged that the purpose of the "in the hand" law was to discourage gun carrying. Such discouragement was for the benefit of "timid citizens." (Some today call a person with an extreme fear of guns, such that the fear interferes with normal daily activities, a "hoplophobe.")In essence, the court had now agreed with the legislature that the right to bear arms was a bad idea. Rather than force the legislature to seek a constitutional amendment to repeal the right, the court accepted the legislature's practical nullification of the right to bear arms by requiring that bearing be done in the most inconvenient and dangerous manner possible.Another 1881 statute prohibited the sale of any pistol other than those "used in the army or navy of the United States and known as the navy pistol." The Arkansas court upheld the ban in Dabbs v. State(1882).OklahomaAt the 1907 Oklahoma constitutional convention, the delegates rejected a proposal to include "common defense" language in the constitutional protection of firearm possession. Instead, the delegates copied nearly verbatim from the Missouri and Colorado constitutions, explicitly protecting "defense of home, person and property" in the right to arms.The following year, however, the Oklahoma Supreme Court in Ex parte Thomas declared that the right was only for militia-type arms, and that a "pistol" was not within the right to arms. Despite what the Thomas court claimed, there was not a single precedent for the proposition that all handguns could be banned. The Thomas court ignored the Missouri Supreme Court's precedent that revolvers in general (not just the Army and Navy models) were protected by the state right to arms (State v. Shelby, 1886).The Oklahoma Supreme Court strangled the state constitution's right to arms shortly after birth. The outrageous Thomas opinion remains the leading precedent in Oklahoma, and thus for more than a century has deprived the people of Oklahoma of the protection of the strong Right to Keep and Bear Arms that they wrote into their constitution. Fortunately, as of 2011, the Oklahoma Legislature has reformed most of the bad gun laws from the Jim Crow era, but the people of Oklahoma suffered decades of deprivations of their rights--including the Right to Carry--before the legislature finally acted.TexasMost people would be surprised to learn that Arkansas and Tennessee were the gun-ban capitals of the United States during Jim Crow, and that Oklahoma was not far behind. People would likewise be surprised that, by the early 20th century, Texas had joined the trend.The Texas Legislature imposed a 50 percent gross receipts tax on the sale of handguns. An intermediate court of appeals upheld the punitive tax (Caswell & Smith v. State, Tex. Civil App., 1912). The court reasoned that handguns, like alcohol, are socially harmful and therefore may be taxed severely. The court added in dicta that prohibiting the sale of handguns would not violate the state constitution.GeorgiaIn 1910, the Georgia Legislature enacted a licensing requirement for the open carry of handguns. The 1910 law was not like the licensing laws in effect today in Georgia and most other states--the modern laws use objective criteria to grant carry permits to adults who meet certain specific standards, such as passing a fingerprint-based background check and a safety course. In contrast, the 1910 Georgia statute provided almost limitless discretion to the licensing authority so that, in effect, political cronies could get licenses and others (especially blacks) could not. Because the legislature had previously outlawed concealed carry, obtaining an open carry license became the only way for a person to lawfully exercise the Right to Carry a handgun.In Strickland v. State(1911) the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the licensing statute. Admitting that the Georgia right was not limited to "common defense," the court said that the carry ban was authorized by the general "police power" of the state--that is, the power to make laws for health, safety, welfare and morals. Yet the very purpose of enumerating rights in a constitution is to limit the police power of the state on certain subjects.Throughout the 20th century, many courts in other states used Georgia's "police power" rationale to uphold a wide range of anti-gun laws, thus turning those states' constitutional right to arms into a practical nullity.FloridaIn 1893 the Florida Legislature adopted a gun control law--that it revised in 1901 and 1906--that prohibited the carrying of handguns and repeating rifles, openly or concealed, with ex­ceptions for peace officers and persons licensed by a county commissioner.A 1941 opinion by Florida Supreme Court Justice Rivers Buford provided a frank explanation of why the carry ban was enacted and how it had actually been enforced:"I know something of the history of this legislation. The original Act of 1893 was passed when there was a great influx of Negro laborers in this state drawn here for the purpose of working in turpentine and lumber camps. The same condition existed when the act was amended in 1901 and the act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers and to thereby reduce the unlawful homicides that were prevalent in turpentine and saw-mill camps and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied. We have no statistics avail­able, but it is a safe guess that more than 80 percent of the white men living in rural sections of Florida have violated this statute. It is also a safe guess to say that not more than 5 percent of the men in Florida who own pistols and repeating rifles have ever applied to the Board of County Commissioners for a permit to have the same in their possession and there has never been, within my knowledge, any effort to enforce the provisions of this statute as to white people, because it has been generally conceded to be in contravention of the Constitution and non-enforceable if contested" (Watson v. State, concurring opinion).Justice Buford pulls back the curtain on the racist gun control statutes and cases discussed here. The statutes never used the word "negro" and the cases upholding those statutes scrupulously avoided any racial language. Yet the purpose and application of those laws was well known.New YorkBy the turn of the century, Jim Crow was spreading beyond its Southern roots. An 1897 New York statute outlawed the possession of a "slungshot, billy, sand club or metal knuckles"--even if nefarious intent was absent. The New York Court of Appeals upheld the ban in 1912 (People v. Persce). The court ignored the fact that the first three of the banned items, at least, have legitimate protective uses, as shown by the fact that police officers often carried them.The next year, New York's intermediate court of appeals, in a 3-2 vote, upheld the infamous 1911 Sullivan Act. That law required a license to possess a handgun in the home, and made the licensing process difficult and highly arbitrary. The act was upheld in spite of the existence of the New York Civil Rights Law, which includes a verbatim copy of the Second Amendment (People ex rel. Darling v. Warden of City Prison). Though unstated, the Sullivan Act targeted blacks as well as Italian and Jewish immigrants.OhioSimilarly, in 1920 the Ohio Supreme Court brushed aside the Ohio Constitution in State v. Nieto to uphold the conviction of a Mexican employee of an Ohio railroad who possessed a concealed handgun in violation of an absolute ban (with no licensing provision) on concealed carry.In dissent, Justice J. Wanamaker's dissent discussed the racial issue that underlies much of gun control history in the United States. He wrote:"I desire to give some special attention to some of the authorities cited, supreme court decisions from Alabama, Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and one or two inferior court decisions from New York, which are given in support of the doctrines upheld by this court. The Southern states have very largely furnished the precedents. It is only necessary to observe that the race issue there has extremely intensified a decisive purpose to entirely disarm the Negro, and this policy is evident upon reading the opinions."The majority decisions in Nieto, Darling, Thomas and many of the other cases discussed above provided the foundation for state courts nullifying the right to arms in state constitutions. These cases are still cited extensively by the gun prohibition lobbies and their judicial allies.These cases are the product of one of the most shameful periods in American judicial history, when judges put aside the constitutions they had sworn to uphold and instead made themselves into tools of white supremacy and Jim Crow.The battle against Jim Crow has been going on for well over a century, and it will not be completed until the Jim Crow gun control cases are recognized for the constitutional abominations that they are, and are placed on the ash heap of history, along with Plessey v. Ferguson and the rest of their ilk.