The Gun Rights vs. Gun Control Debate Is as Much About Race as It Is About Guns

Gun rights and gun control play a big role in the culture and politics of America. They always have. And in the past few years, the debate over those rights and reforms has reached a fever pitch as we’ve seen a significant rise in gun violence. In this year alone, nearly 7,300 people have died from gun violence, and we’ve witnessed 241 mass shootings. In fact, the U.S. is on pace to set a new record for the number of deaths from mass shootings in a single year.

Black Americans fare far worse than White Americans. As reported by Everytown for Gun Safety, Black Americans are the victims of 10 times the number of gun homicides, 18 times the number of gun assault injuries, and nearly three times the number of fatal shootings by police than White Americans.

In the aftermath of many of these shootings, one segment of the country has cried out for increased gun control measures. The other segment, though, has continued to decry gun control as infringing on our Second Amendment rights. The problem is that the Second Amendment is not race-neutral. As historian Carol Anderson, bestselling author of White Rage, brilliantly explains in her latest book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, the issue of gun rights and gun control has a pointedly racist history in the United States.

We need to acknowledge the systemic racism embedded in gun policy to ensure that the measures we take to reform our laws account for their racist history throughout America’s existence.

Gun control born out of racist fear

One of the first pushes for gun control in modern history came in the 1960s after the emergence and expansion of the Black Panther Party and their willingness to bear arms in public.

On May 2, 1967, when California was still an open-carry state, a group of roughly 30 Black Panther Party members arrived on the steps of the state Capitol building, armed. The Panthers’ co-founder Bobby Seale faced then-Governor Ronald Reagan and the students he was visiting with outside, and read aloud the following statement:

Fearful, Reagan and his fellow White legislators acted quickly, passing a law banning people from carrying loaded guns in public within weeks. The gun control movement was so energized by the desire to oppose the Black Panthers (and the possibility of armed Black people more broadly) that even the National Rifle Association (NRA) joined California politicians in sponsoring the legislation!

Despite the perception of a bloodthirsty Black menace, the reality is that the reason the Black Panthers—and many other Black activists, politicians, and citizens then and since—owned guns had more to do with self-defense than preemptive strikes. Their lives were at risk at all times, and they could not count on protection from the government. In fact, quite the opposite: On numerous occasions, Black Panthers and anybody who happened to be in their presence were gunned down in cold blood by agents of the government.

Gun rights’ racist history

The connection between guns and race in the United States goes back even further in our history, to the 17th century. In The Second, Anderson walks through the long history of gun laws prohibiting enslaved African Americans from owning, carrying, or using firearms as long ago as 1639 in colonial Virginia, where White slave-owners and legislators wanted to ensure that their dominance would not be challenged.

Created and ratified in 1791, the letter of the Second Amendment contains no words that directly implicate race. It states, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

However, the spirit of the Second Amendment had everything to do with race. In 18th-century America, the main goal of state militias was to prevent slave revolts and monitor their behavior and property. As a result, the Second Amendment was explicitly concerned with preventing enslaved Black people from attaining the power and ability to defend themselves that White men were granted by being able to freely own and use guns.

Furthermore, as it’s widely interpreted, the Right to Bear Arms grants this right to all citizens. But in 1791, Black people were not classified as full citizens in the States; citizenship was given to White people alone.

Whether or not they would realize or openly admit it, for many White Americans this original intent is still intact. For White nationalists, this implication is explicit. For them, the fight for gun rights is more about keeping guns in the hands of as many White people as possible (i.e., gun rights) and out of the hands of as many Black people as possible (i.e., selective gun control, sometimes even backed by the NRA, when it comes to Black people).

The need for anti-racist, systemic change to protect Black life

Many White people in this country blame Black people for gun violence. For instance, Blake Masters, a Trump-backed Republican Senate candidate in Arizona in the 2022 election, said in a podcast appearance, “We do have a gun violence problem in this country, and it’s gang violence. It’s […] Black people, frankly.” Such accusations persist despite the high number of White males involved in mass shootings (often against Black targets), and the disproportionately high numbers of Black Americans who continue to be shot by police officers and White supremacists across the country.

On the face of it, gun control aims to protect citizens by limiting general access to lethal weapons. But one question is whether gun control further perpetuates the lack of Black protection, leaving some Black citizens uncertain of where to stand on the issue.

As Nigerian-American political strategist and organizer Akin Olla wrote in an op-ed in The Guardian in June 2022:

Olla himself bought his first gun in 2020. “I never thought I’d be a gun owner,” he wrote. “It wasn’t until the terror that I experienced during the George Floyd uprising that I, like many Black Americans, was moved to become a first-time gun owner.”

Often, laws are not designed to protect minority groups. On the contrary, they often persecute or exclude them—as some criminal justice or voting rights legislation does. The gun rights vs. gun control issue is no different. Racism drove gun rights at the start, it has motivated gun control in the past, and it’s driving gun rights advocacy again now. So we have seen a complete 360-degree cycle.

Gun control works, and the numbers prove it. But for modern gun control to truly protect all American lives—not just White Americans—it must not exclude minority groups from being able to protect themselves in the face of frequent and legitimate threats. Given the issue’s historically racist roots, and our historically racist institutions, we need anti-racist, institutional change beyond whatever gun control measures we’re able to enact in the immediate future to ensure equal protection for all, under the law.