The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America

by Carol Anderson

Gun control laws, to be clear, were everywhere in antebellum America. Indeed, “the South was the gun control center of the United States as local governments tried to lessen the violence among whites that seemed to dominate the region.”215 But the laws targeted at Black people that banned or severely limited access to weapons, carried racialized criteria and punishments. Even a court ruling that overturned a handgun ban in Georgia did not invalidate a law prohibiting Blacks from possessing any type of firearm.

Of the sixty-five homicides by police that the Los Angeles coroner’s office investigated during this period, sixty-four were ruled justifiable homicides.” That included nearly thirty who were shot in the back, twenty-five who were unarmed, twenty-three who were being tracked for a nonviolent crime, and four who weren’t suspected of anything at the time the police gunned them down.

“It’s impossible to be unarmed when your Blackness is the weapon that they fear.”160