States thus legislated even greater controls on who could have a gun and under what circumstances. The enslaved were already banned from possession, but legislatures were determined to be even more explicit. It wasn’t just gun ownership but the “sale or delivery of firearms to slaves [that] was forbidden in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and North Carolina.”116 South Carolina and Louisiana added that no slave could even use a firearm unless it was with the expressed permission of whites “to hunt within the boundaries of the owner’s plantation.”117
