What is the history of Gun Control in the US ?

S

Scott Evans

Staff Alumnus
Can anyone outline for me in a nut shell the beginning of Gun control in the US and the major points up to the present?

I see where we are and I see where we’re headed but I am trying to develop a time line in the process of the erosion of our freedoms.
 
The first gun control was towards Amerinds and slaves, then we get:

1) Jim Crow laws..after the Civil War up thru the 1930's
2) Similar laws in Calif regarding the Chinese (all Asians were considered "Chinese")..later extended to Hispanics
3) Sullivan Law in New York circa 1910..directed towards southern European (read Italian) and Jewish immigrants...later extended to these same folks after citizenship
4) Prohibition brought about organized crime and lead to US v Miller 1934....Miller was a petty bootlegging thug.

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"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes"
 
Scott;

What DC has said kind of holds true. However, most of the Laws he talks about are "local" laws.

The begining of "Centralized" (read Federal) Gun Laws in this country was the National Fireams Act of 1934. Then there was some amendments to that Act, followed by the Gun Control Act of 68 (?), and then more and more followed on close heels after that.

If you really what it put into purspective pick up a copy of "Unintended Consequences" by John Ross (amazon has it). Mr. Ross uses firearms legislation as the crux of this book. The book starts at around the turn of the centure and comes up to current times (mid 90s). A MUST READ!

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Schmit, GySgt, USMC(Ret)
NRA Life, Lodge 1201-UOSSS
"Si vis Pacem Para Bellum"
 
I usually cite the Jim Crow laws and the Southern Black Codes as the beginning of gun control in the US. The Southerners attempted to keep recently emancipated blacks in a status of virtual slavery by keeping them unarmed and dependent on the generosity of those in power. This would seem to hold a little more water with liberal types. They would have a difficult time disputing this position and it may be possible to make them see gun control in a different light.

Like DC seems to say, it started as a method to keep the perceived lower classes in check.


[This message has been edited by Destructo6 (edited April 22, 1999).]
 
There was a federal law predating the NFA of '34. Entitled the National Revolver Act or something of that nature.

ALL of these laws were selectively enforced until after the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Find a white, Anglo Saxon, middle class person prosecuted under them. Even gangsters were not prosecuted under these laws unless their name happened to end in a vowel and often not then. After 1964, the authorities were in a quandary, enforce these laws against WASP's or give them up. They chose to go with equal enforcement rather than give up acquired power.

DC, I have a little bit of a problem with characterizing Miller as a petty bootlegging thug. Petty, yes. Bootlegging, yes. Thug?
The South had been in a deep depression since the end of the War of Northern Aggression. When the Great Depression hit, the rest of the nation became poor. What happened in the South could not be described as a depression-Great or otherwise. People were starving. I would distill liquor, grow marijuana, or do just about anything not involving violence or fraud to feed my children. It would not make me a thug.

My sheriff and his brother who recently retired as the assistant director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were raised on the income provided by moonshine. Their father was one of the largest moonshiners in eastern, central Georgia. I've sometimes embarassed them by asking how they could, in good conscious, arrest moonshiners. There are many families in the South who owe their literal survival to people who risked their lives and freedom to feed them by making moonshine.
 
Spartacus struck a chord when he referenced teh selective enforcement of gun laws. I did some casual calculations a while back that indicated that if you 'threw the book' at someone who used a firearm in the commission of a felony, s/he would could go to jail for upwards of 173 years! It is ironic that the morons want more laws when it is SO clear that the ones we have a) don't work, and b) aren't being properly enforced. The existing laws work fine WHEN THEY'RE APPLIED, e.g. Operation Exile in Richmond, VA, and Philadelphia (not sure that Philly is in the pgm yet).

Why is it that gun charges are among the first to be bargained away in a plea bargain? What on earth makes the fools think that more laws will stop things like Littleton when every damn thing those bastards did was already illeagal? How is further limiting my ability to protect myself & family from crims and crazies going to make teh world a safer place? Someone (Jeff Cooper?) said that when encountering evil unarmed, the only recourse is to flee, and evil is not vanquished by running away.

Sorry for the rant, but I'm sooooo pisssssssed. M2
 
Spartacus...
Once when reading about US v Miller, I came across a profile on Mr. Miller. He wasn't a particularly nice man, and not because he was a bootlegger. He did indulge in thuggish behavior (robbery) as well.

I may have been unclear in my post...Miller was a small fish...a bootlegger (something I have no problem with) and a thug. He was not a killer or a public enemy class. I wouldn't invite him to dinner, however nor would I wish him jailed forever. My point (which I failed to do) was to show how certain people and peoples were used and targeted to enact unjust laws, merely because they were "undesirable".

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"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes"
 
There is an article in the 41st ed. of the Gun Digest entitled,"OUR FIRST GUN LAW". To make it short, the state of Kentucky enacted the first law making it illegal to carry concealed. It was passed on Feb, 3,1813.
The final pargraph,"Kentucky's 1813 ban on arms not open to common observation was America's first Morton Grove: it was a shocking infringment on the right to bear arms,nullified by civil disobedience and, eventually, a high court. Still it was the first inroad in an Anglo-Saxon freedom never before violated in a thousand years of legal history."
I though you might find it interesting.
Paul B.
COMPROMISE IS NOT AN OPTION!
 
Paul...

Thanks...can you furnish anymore info on that law? Name, number?
I'd like to make a time line of gun control for reference

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"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes"
 
Here's a statement made in 1941 by Florida Supreme Court Justice Buford in the case of Warren vs. Stone, involving a Caucasian Florida resident caught packing a gun without a permit and referring to Florida's old Discretionary system thrown out in 1986:

"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." - Watson v. Stone,
4 So.2d 700, 703 (Fla. 1941) (Note: Per scholarly work by Clayton Cramer, "The Racist Roots of Gun Control")

Next, check out an article about the founding of the Michigan CCW system:

http://www.detroitnews.com/EDITPAGE/9903/04/sweet/sweet.htm

So there's no question about the origins of discretionary CCW. They were crafted to allow bigoted cops to control minority access to shootin' irons.

And guess what? These ideas predate NFA1934, which contains the "local Sheriff sign-off" on ownership of full-auto. That said, many Fed agents were less biased than most local cops, so the NFA rules were enforced "mostly against everybody", in terms of busting people for guns not legally registered under the NFA rules. The hard part (for minorities in particular) was getting the Sheriff's signoff for legal ownership, and that's true to this day.

Don't believe me?

Lemme 'splain something. In my mostly-white county, there's two mainly-black towns. Contra Costa County, California, the towns are Richmond and Pittsburg.

Care to guess which two towns were set up as total-zero-CCW zones by the two white PD Chiefs and the white Sheriff?

Now, the good news is, the Richmond portion of the three-way conspiracy was set up by the FORMER Chief and was being maintained out of intertia by the staff. When my lawsuit hit combined with the info I've quoted in this post above, a minority staffer in the city Attorney's office just about died. He talked to the Chief, who's white...and they agreed to "clean up", allowing people to apply and judging their needs and merits individually and without racial or economic-class bias. And the Chief chose a black Captain (Ray Howard) to do the initial screening.

(Note to all: I'm white, but as a Richmond resident the policies screwed me equally. They had to use "geographic redlining" to carry out a racist policy - HOWEVER, we're delving into the Sheriff's issuance/denial records and we expect to find several metric tons of topsoil.)

I've dropped my suit against the city and RPD, but it continues against the Sheriff. I'm asking the court to strip the Sheriff of all discretionary power after finding him totally incapable of administering the CCW system in an unbiased, legal and honest fashion.

There's a WHOLE lot more at my website, at:
http://www.ninehundred.net/~equalccw

Jim March
 
Oh, and the oldest gun law in the US dates to 1779, and prohibits slaves from travelling with arms in Virginia. I had a link to it from my site, but it went away. I'm trying to get it back...

Jim March
 
One more detail: the FEDERAL portion of the Class3 ownership process under the NFA rules is handled on a "shall-issue" basis.

Using logic almost identical to my lawsuit against the inherent bias in CA's discretionary CCW, there's a group suing to declare the local signoff provision of the NFA rules unconstitutional violations of equal protection. Like discretionary CCW, the local signoff provision intentionally creates a "rule by men and not by law" and is wide open to abuse on a racial, classist/elitist or outright corrupt basis.

NYC's Sullivan law on discretionary gun ownership and similar "gun owner's permit" laws can be dismantled the same way.

It's about time. Between NFA and the local discretionary carry/ownership permits, most of the worst US gun laws are based on the personal discretion of PD Chiefs, Sheriffs and Judges. They've worsened racial tensions, they've been a key area of law enforcement corruption, they've maintained illegal class-based discrimination in RKBA.

We haven't been fighting these based on the equal protection principles built up during the civil rights movement era. Screw the 2nd, we've been fighting on the wrong front entirely. They can't preserve biased systems in court without dismantling the civil rights movement.

Jim March
 
The Sullivan Law in NY was promoted and passed by Democratic Tammany Hall interests after a Republican poll watcher shot a Democrat who was engaged in the innocent and unremarkable practice of stuffing a ballot boxes. They could not have interference with Boss Tweed's right to vote for everybody.

Gun control laws are not enacted in a vacuum. They are passed not in response to individual crime, but in response to establishment fear. The first British gun laws were passed in the wake of the General Strike and the threat of Anarchism. The depression era laws were not passed in response to prohibition crimes, but in response to potential trouble from Communists and from the likes of Coxey's army and the Bonus Marchers. These posed a threat to the establishment that Al Capone never did. GCA 68 was passed not in response to the assassinations, but in response to the riots that followed. We can look forward to learning about some kind of awful "threat" (a real or faked "armed uprising" by Serbo-Americans, or Muslims, maybe) that will terrify Congress into passing more laws.

This helps explain why gun control people want to prohibit ordinary people from having arms and make no pretense that their proposed laws would reduce crime. Criminals threaten only individuals, not the "powers that be."

Crime is the excuse for gun control, not the cause of it.

Jim
 
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