The Ugly History of Democrats, Gun Control and Race
The Second Amendment was not used to enforce oppression in America. Gun control was created to give free rein to slavers and later the Klan.
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by Rod D. Martin
August 25, 2025
In recent weeks, multiple states have filed suit to overturn the odious National Firearms Act, which has established an unconstitutional national firearms registry since its passage in 1934. The FDR-era Supreme Court upheld it, but only as an exercise of the taxing power. Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill eliminated the tax, thus rendering that decision moot. The NFA will almost certainly be overturned next year.
I note this with much gloating. But my aim today (see what I did there?) is not at the NFA itself, but at its defenders, who as they seemingly must always do, have made the issue about race.
Oh the irony.
One example, from one of my more antagonistic correspondents:
Gun ownership also played a large role in preserving slavery and slaves...The CSA fought with guns, am I right? They used their 2d amendment rights to attempt secession... which was to preserve slavery. guns were used to enforce the fugitive slave act. Even when black Americans were theoretically legally permitted to use guns, guns were used by law enforcement and extrajudicial groups to institute racial terror and it wasn't just the klan.
This is precisely backward. Indeed, it is headache-inducing.
It was not the Second Amendment but rather the restriction of gun ownership to whites that maintained slavery. This was not only in the form of gun control laws but also of judicial theory. One of the more significant holdings of the infamous 1857 Dred Scott case was that blacks could not be citizens, because citizens necessarily have the right to own guns.
"[I]t would give them the full liberty," Chief Justice Taney wrote, horrified, "to keep and carry arms wherever they went."
Shortly after Dred Scott, the Democrat Party in the South seceded from the Union to preserve the enslavement of the black race. The Democrat Party in the North rioted, aided and abetted the enemy, and did everything in its power to help its Southern brethren. After losing the Civil War, the first thing Democrats did was enact gun controls against blacks (a key part of the 1866 "Black Codes" which were intended to re-reduce them to semi-slavery).
The more things change....
This attempt to erase the preceding five years of struggle resulted in the Republican passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which explicitly guaranteed Second Amendment rights to the freed slaves (they also enacted little things like the 14th and 15th Amendments). But after Reconstruction, the Democrats again enacted gun control against blacks in every state. And make no mistake: it was against blacks. In the words of segregationist Democrat (but they were all Democrats) Florida Supreme Court Justice Rivers Buford in 1941:
I know something of the history of this legislation. The original Act of 1893 was passed when there was a great influx of negro laborers in this State drawn here for the purpose of working in turpentine and lumber camps. The same condition existed when the Act was amended in 1901 and the Act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers and to thereby reduce the unlawful homicides that were prevalent in turpentine and saw-mill camps and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied. [Emphasis added]
So much for equal protection.
Prior to 1968, hardly any gun control law in the United States was ever generalized to the white population, and indeed, the Gun Control Act of 1968 was a response by the Democrats in Congress to the (largely black) rioting that convulsed the nation that summer.
But did the South use the Second Amendment to start the Civil War, as my above-quoted correspondent suggests? And was it the Second Amendment that enabled the Klan?
Again, this is precisely backward.
First, the South did not "use its Second Amendment rights" to secede. By definition, secession meant the South was actively repudiating the entire U.S. Constitution and the Second Amendment with it. The forces it employed to wage the war were government forces: the armies raised by the same state governments that had deprived blacks of their Second Amendment rights before the war, and which continued to do so afterward.
The guns used to impose slavery were government guns, enforcing government laws against private gun ownership. Armed black citizens were the greatest fear of those governments, and would have been their undoing. It was the Second Amendment's abrogation, not its enactment, that made this possible. The Southern states unconstitutionally restricted gun rights so that only the government and those in league with it could own firearms.
Nothing has really changed. Today, unarmed J6 rioters faced the joy of rotting in prison for years. Meanwhile, BLM rioters literally burning down cities faced virtually no consequences, and senior Democrat officials including Kamala Harris raised their bail money online. The issue is not violence, as we see every day in Democrat-run cities. The issue is always whether the violence, or potential for it, might be aimed at Democrat control.
They learned this from Europe. At the time our Bill of Rights was enacted, every country in the Old World had guns, and had laws preventing common people from possessing them. Our Founding Fathers were adamant that America would be different, that power would lie not with oppressive regimes but with the people, in the most tangible, practical way possible.
Contrary to the writer's confused argument, the Second Amendment was not enacted to preserve gun ownership for governments: why would such a thing even be necessary? The Constitution already gave government the power to make war, and every state already had the police power.
And anyway, try to name a government that does not possess guns. And then, name any gun control law that has tried to take guns from the government.
They are all aimed at the people. And in Democrat-run areas, they are all aimed only at certain people.
Some argue there's no need for regular people to possess guns now, that this whole line of thought is obsolete. At the exact same time, they burn down cities and protest police departments that stand aside for Occupy, BLM and Antifa, and which not that long ago were actively cooperating with and frequently staffed by the Ku Klux Klan.
Superficially, these groups might seem opposed to each other. But they are not. They are all terror wings of the Democrat Party. Imagine the terror we would face if Democrats succeeded in packing the Court, abolishing the Senate, and censoring all opposition. Some of us, anyway.
In enacting the Second Amendment, the Founders were protecting us from a government (and its auxiliaries) monopoly on force. Whenever and wherever that right is surrendered, terrible things tend to follow.
The Second Amendment was not used to enforce oppression in America. Gun control was used to give free rein to slavers and later the Klan, even in our own lifetimes. "It can't happen here," the left promises us. But it already has happened here. It continues to happen here. And it is and always has been the Democrat Party that did it.
