In early colonial America, firearms were the armaments of white upper-class power and a benefit that upper-class whites bestowed on lower-class whites to separate them from people of color. In England, gun ownership was a right restricted to the wealthy—the principle being that anyone below the rank of gentleman found with a gun was a poacher. But 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
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