The Real History of Gun Control

UCLA Constitutional law professor Adam Winkler – whose commentary has been featured on CNN, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and numerous other outlets, and who is a contributor to The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post – notes (via the Wall Street Journal):

[The history of gun control in America]  was a constant pressure among white racists to keep guns out of the hands of African-Americans, because they would rise up and revolt.
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The KKK began as a gun-control organization. Before the Civil War, blacks were never allowed to own guns. During the Civil War, blacks kept guns for the first time – either they served in the Union army and they were allowed to keep their guns, or they buy guns on the open market where for the first time there’s hundreds of thousands of guns flooding the marketplace after the war ends. So they arm up because they know who they’re dealing with in the South. White racists do things like pass laws to disarm them, but that’s not really going to work. So they form these racist posses all over the South to go out at night in large groups to terrorize blacks and take those guns away. If blacks were disarmed, they couldn’t fight back.

Brendan O’Neill notes at the Guardian:
For years – for two centuries, in fact – gun control was a largely Right-wing, reactionary campaign issue, not a Left-wing one. The fact that it has now been adopted by Leftists is very revealing indeed.  Read more: (Washington's Blog)