It wasn’t just about the right to a well-regulated militia. The “right to bear arms” was not a right at all. The ongoing push to further disarm Black people was relentless. Even when calling upon the Black militia to save New Orleans from Deslondes’s slave revolt, Claiborne had banned all gun and ammunition sales to people of color, including free Blacks. In Virginia by 1832, “free Negroes [were] not to carry firelocks of any kind, under penalty of thirty-nine lashes.”
