“ALL GUN CONTROL IS RACIST”

Thanks to Maj Toure, founder of Black Guns Matter, many have heard the phrase: “All Gun Control is Racist.” But is he right? In short, pretty much — however, you can add a splash of nepotism and a whole lotta classism into those laws as well.

Outright gun bans didn’t exist much in early history. A few exceptions include the ban of wheellocks by Emperor Maximillian I of the Holy Roman Empire in the 1500s as well as Army Navy laws in the post-Civil War South (more on this later). The earliest gun laws rather focused on the concept of who could and couldn’t own firearms. By the 20th century, however, these laws shifted away from overt racism to regulations of guns and their features, such as the National Firearms Act, Hughes Amendment, and assault weapons bans. Yet, in many cases, these “modern” regulations still achieved the same goal as the laws of the past. As a subsequent result, whether consciously or unconsciously, these laws have become a passive-aggressive discriminatory tool that impacts people in many ways, including lower-income families burdened by financial hurdles to gun ownership.

In several episodes of the Cody Firearms Museum podcast, History Unloaded — yes, I just plugged myself — Curator Danny Michael