![]() ![]() 945, 947 (2018) (Thomas, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari). First, the history of racist gun laws will complicate the emergent Second Amendment test that looks to “text, history, and tradition” to determine the scope of the Second Amendment. What are the implications of this racist history of gun laws on how we understand and apply the Second Amendment? This Essay considers three. For much of American history, gun rights did not extend to Black people and gun control was often enacted to limit access to guns by people of color. Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America 235 (2011). was denied a concealed carry permit even after his house was firebombed. Even facially neutral laws were used in a racially discriminatory fashion Martin Luther King Jr. After the Civil War, the Black Codes enacted in the South made it a crime for a Black person to have a gun. Chief Justice Roger Taney argued that one reason Black people could not be citizens under the Constitution was that it “would give to persons of the negro race” the right “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” 5 × 5. Diamond, The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, in Gun Control and the Constitution: Sources and Explorations on the Second Amendment 403, 403 (Robert J. A Florida law in 1825 authorized white people to “enter into all Negro houses” and “lawfully seize and take away all such arms, weapons, and ammunition.” 3 × 3. N.y. courts seek root out racism free#The founding generation that wrote the Second Amendment had racist gun laws, including prohibitions on the possession or carrying of firearms by Black people, whether free or enslaved. 309, 333–42 (1991) (outlining the ways in which American gun control specifically restricted Black Americans’ access to guns). Diamond, The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, 80 Geo. Pol’y, Winter 1995, at 17 (arguing that American gun laws were designed to disempower racial minorities) and Robert J. Cramer, The Racist Roots of Gun Control, Kan. On the racist history of gun laws, see generally Clayton E. For a significant portion of American history, gun laws bore the ugly taint of racism. ![]()
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