From the founding of America, gun laws were written in racially tinged ink. In the colonial South, militias and slave patrols were created to control Black people and suppress rebellion. As early as 1704, organized slave patrols roamed Southern colonies, arming white men and tasking them with the perpetual surveillance and disarmament of enslaved populations. By the mid-18th century, this system was codified into law: As legal historian Carl Bogus recounts, between 1755 and 1757, Georgia law required every plantation's armed militia to conduct monthly searches of “all Negro houses for offensive weapons and ammunition.”
Gun ownership in America did not initially materialize as a personal right to self-defense so much as an underpinning of white security. As slave revolts spread across the Atlantic world — culminating in the first successful Black revolution in Haiti — lawmakers moved to further codify these fears. Colonial statutes explicitly barred Black people from keeping or carrying weapons, embedding racial hierarchy directly into early American gun policy. As historian Carol Anderson told Democracy Now, each slave revolt triggered “a series of statutes that the enslaved, that Black people, could not own weapons.”