The court's 6-3 conservative majority has expanded gun rights but has also shown a reluctance in recent months to take up new cases on the scope of the right to bear arms.
During Reconstruction, several states, especially Southern states, passed laws banning concealed carry. These laws were often aimed at disarming African-Americans, and though they did not explicitly say so because of the 14th Amendment, were not to be >enforced against whites.
Rivers H. Buford, associate justice of the Florida Supreme Court, said that the Florida law banning concealed carry, “[t]he original Act of 1893 … was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers … 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. … [I]t is a safe guess to assume that more than 80% of the white men living in the rural sections of Florida have violated this statute. It is also a safe guess to say that not more than 5% of the men in Florida who own pistols and repeating rifles have ever applied to the Board of County Commissioners for a permit to have the same in their possession and there has never been, within my knowledge, any effort to enforce the provisions of this statute as to white people, because it >has been generally conceded to be in contravention to the Constitution and non-enforceable if contested.”[11]
In fact, Florida was not the only such state to ban the carriage of arms by blacks, nor was it the most explicit. The 1834 Tennessee Constitution, 1836 Arkansas Constitution, as well as the 1838 Florida constitution, stated “That the free white men of this State shall have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence.”
This continued into the modern day, with Ronald Reagan and the NRA supporting and implementing the Mulford Act specifically to illegalize and target the Black Panthers and other black communities, who were exercising their rights to arm themselves to protect against police brutality and racists. Unfortunately the arming and legal targeting of the Black Panthers for that arming was very likely an FBI operation.
Equality was an ideological principle woven throughout the Constitution, but it was selectively granted to only a few. That doesn’t mean we should throw out the idea of equality because it wasn’t applied correctly. In the same way we shouldn’t throw out firearm restrictions because they were applied selectively.
Conceal carry restrictions have a long history of being created and selectively enforced against the black population.
Example:
This continued into the modern day, with Ronald Reagan and the NRA supporting and implementing the Mulford Act specifically to illegalize and target the Black Panthers and other black communities, who were exercising their rights to arm themselves to protect against police brutality and racists. Unfortunately the arming and legal targeting of the Black Panthers for that arming was very likely an FBI operation.
There were some concealed gun control laws in old west towns that were implemented against whites as well, but even then, only selectively against those the local Law Enforcement didn’t like.
Equality was an ideological principle woven throughout the Constitution, but it was selectively granted to only a few. That doesn’t mean we should throw out the idea of equality because it wasn’t applied correctly. In the same way we shouldn’t throw out firearm restrictions because they were applied selectively.