Gun Laws in Early America

Abstract

Abstract Scholars readily assume that early America guns laws focused purely on military readiness and community defense. However, analysis of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century enactments reveals that European colonists in North America created conflicting, contradictory laws for multiple reasons affecting gun ownership, control, and use. Economic advantages competed with personal protection, for human foes (pirates, Native Americans enemies, Spanish or French imperial rivals) were not their sole targets; Southern colonists also hunted deer for profit and wolves for bounties. Native allies (voluntarily) and African slaves (involuntarily) might also do so on their behalf, frequently without White participation or supervision. Armed slaves were even briefly inducted into South Carolina’s militia as imperial defenders, and armed Native Americans proved skillful in producing skins for export, a major source of trade income. But equipping Natives and enslaved people with guns brought Southern colonists into conflict with each other. Armed and hostile Natives and slaves constituted security threats to colonists. Thus, colonial laws veered between priorities of arming, controlling, or disarming gun owners, particularly Native American and enslaved gun users as well as vagrants. White legislatures applied gun control laws to specific groups, influenced by racism and assumptions about what constituted civilization (hunting versus farming). Driven by profit, reckless colonists evaded disarming laws and continued to provide weapons to slaves or Natives, dangerously increasing White community vulnerability.