in the New World, white men “were armed and had to be armed,” as historian Edmund Morgan describes it. Upper-class colonial white people allowed poor white people to carry firearms to quell rebellions by chattel slaves or to repel Native Americans and pirates. Aristocratic whites then found a new reason to carry firearms—to quell potential rebellions by lower-class whites. Laws in seventeenth-century Virginia allowed white people to carry firearms and forbade African slaves and Native Americans from doing so. Meanwhile, the first US authorities in New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase moved
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