REMINDER: The pro-slavery origins of American gun control.

The colonies with large slave populations also had significant populations of free blacks. South of the Mason-Dixon line, various laws were enacted against unauthorized arms possession by slaves, and sometimes against free blacks as well. In the South, slave patrols searched slave quarters to look for unauthorized arms.

Today, some people believe a bogus theory that the Second Amendment was created for the sole purpose of suppressing slave insurrections. But this can’t explain the ardent support for arms rights in Massachusetts, where slavery had already been abolished by 1791, or in Pennsylvania, where slavery was rare and already on its way to extinction.

In fact, American abolitionists such as Joel Tiffany and Lysander Spooner later used the Second Amendment to argue that slavery was unconstitutional: The distinction between a free person and a slave is that the latter is forbidden to possess arms. Because the Constitution guaranteed all persons the right to keep and bear arms, it thereby implicitly forbade slavery.

Soon after the Confederacy surrendered in 1865, Frederick Douglass warned that even after slavery was abolished (as it would be, by the Thirteenth Amendment later that year) the slave states would try to keep the ex-slaves in de facto servitude. Douglass explained the need for federal law to stop state and local governments from infringing the freedmen’s rights. Until there was a new constitutional amendment to make states obey the Second Amendment, “the work of the Abolitionists is not finished.”

Lots of good stuff — read the whole thing.