Preliminary disclaimer: I don't care much about guns one way or the other. It's not an issue that gets me excited. That said, however, there has been an increasing amount of research that shows gun control legislation originated in the second half of the 19th century as an effort to ensure that newly freed blacks couldn't get firearms. Here are two academic law review articles, one from
Georgetown Law Review and one from
Chicago-Kent Law Review.
Then there is the discussion about what the framers of the 14th Amendment thought they were accomplishing. As you probably know, the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868 to ensure that newly freed blacks would get full rights of citizenship and that Southern states couldn't re-enslave them under pretense (an effort that pretty much failed, as Jim Crow got institutionalized.)
Jonathan Adler over at the Volokh Conspiracy (one of the law-related sites I really enjoy; it's a collection of law professors with libertarianish views) quotes this tidbit that I thought was fascinating:
Quote:
Before the Civil War, gun ownership was a prerequisite not only of militia service but also of participation in sheriffs' posses and for personal defense. But it was a right for whites only. Southern states forbade slaves to own guns, lest they revolt. (Free blacks, in the North and South, could sometimes have guns under tight restrictions.) After the Civil War, the same Congress that made African Americans citizens through the 14th Amendment considered the antebellum experience and concluded that equal access to arms was a necessary attribute of blacks' new status.
The Freedmen's Bureau Act of 1866 promised that "personal liberty, personal security, and the acquisition, enjoyment, and disposition of estate, real and personal, including the constitutional right to bear arms, shall be secured to and enjoyed by all the citizens." This was no theoretical concern. As senators noted during the debate on the bill, many Southern states sought to reimpose legal bans on gun ownership by blacks -- leaving them at the mercy of Klansmen and other white terrorists.
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This has implications in terms of the 14th Amendment's intent to incorporate the bill of rights, which didn't actually happen for decades afterwards, but also speaks to what the understanding of the 2nd Amendment was in 1868 when the 14th Amendment was passed to force the states to recognize federal rights. Interesting, eh?