by Dave Kopel and Joseph Greenlee

Guns have historically protected Americans from white supremacists, just as gun control has historically protected white supremacists from the Americans they terrorize.

One month after the Confederate surrender in 1865, Frederick Douglass urged federal action to stop state and local infringement of the right to arms. Until this was accomplished, Douglass argued, “the work of the abolitionists is not finished.”

Indeed, it was not. As the Special Report of the Paris Anti-Slavery Conference of 1867 found, freedmen in some southern states “were forbidden to own or bear firearms, and thus were rendered defenseless against assault.” Thus, white supremacists could continue to control freedmen through threat of violence.

Read the whole article originally published in The Hill on August 22, 2017.