In 1968, a bipartisan law requiring residents to obtain a Firearm Owners Identification Card in order to legally own a gun took effect. The Republican lawmakers who proposed the bill saw it as a compromise, since the Illinois State National Rifle Association did not want a statewide handgun registry.
The bill gained steam when officials pitched its ability to aid police in, as one Chicago Tribune news article described, “large scale assaults in racial disturbances.” While the state stopped short of a comprehensive registry, the city of Chicago passed its own.
Some Black lawmakers in Chicago decried the new gun regulations as racist, according to articles published in the Chicago Defender, the city’s historic Black newspaper.
Chicago Alderman Sammy Rayner was one of those concerned about the city law passed under Daley requiring residents to register their guns.
“Information has come to me that the ordinances are part of a grand conspiracy to control the Black community. One thing is true; it would enhance the position of the authorities if they knew the whereabouts of all guns controlled by Black people,” Rayner told the Defender. “Gun control, ‘mob action’ arrests with high bonds, and ‘field contact’ interviews all go together to contain the Black ghetto.”
Roy Innis, a Black nationalist at the time, also felt the enforcement would lead to racial disparities. “White racist police and judges and prosecutors will be enforcing these laws, and we know how laws are now implemented,” he wrote to the paper. “Black people will be disarmed, and [W]hite people will not be.”
Illinois lawmakers weren’t the only ones pushing for a version of gun control meant to curtail the burgeoning Black Power movement. In California, in direct response to the Black Panthers legally carrying guns on state capitol grounds, officials swiftly passed a law banning openly carrying loaded firearms.
Following the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, Congress enacted the Gun Control Act, with NRA support. The laws regulated interstate gun sales, included a 21-and-up age requirement to purchase firearms, and prohibited people with felony convictions from legally owning guns.
That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a pivotal opinion in Terry v. Ohio, declaring that police could stop and search someone suspected of committing a crime and being armed — without violating the Fourth Amendment right to unlawful search and seizures. Today, this practice is commonly referred to as a Terry stop.
“[It] makes perfect sense that in a racist, apartheid-like society, you're going to have laws that restrict access to dangerous weapons to keep the powerless, powerless,” said Adam Winkler, a Second Amendment historian and law professor at UCLA. “We have definitely seen a racist history of gun laws — not to say that all gun laws are racist,” he said.