Mandatory gun ownership went hand-in-hand with strict gun restrictions, and in the emerging racialized polity of British North America, this meant banning guns among enslaved Africans and free blacks as well as strong prohibitions on selling guns to indigenous people. What’s more, the historian Kathleen Brown observes in “Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia,” mass gun ownership among white men enabled a “male popular culture that appeared to transcend social differences,” one which “permitted white men to participate in a solidarity of race that minimized their class differences but also in a fraternity of men, united and empowered by the gun culture they shared.” The “inherent honor of white manhood,” she writes, “became increasingly based on the right to carry a gun.”

These dynamics carried over into the creation of the United States. At its founding, the United States was a white republic whose Constitution reflected settler preoccupation with racial control. As it grew and expanded, so would Americans’ racialized understanding of rights, responsibilities, personhood and citizenship.

Gun ownership in particular was for white men. It took disunion and the threat of political dissolution to break that taboo, although, in the aftermath of the Civil War, many white Americans retained their hostility to arms-bearing blacks. Postwar “black codes” in former Confederate states like Alabama prohibited “any freedman, mulatto or free person of color to own firearms, or carry about this person a pistol or other deadly weapon.” None of this actually stopped blacks, especially former Union soldiers, from owning guns, and subsequent decades would see black Americans develop a tradition of arms carried for defense against white supremacists, either lawless terrorists or state-sponsored vigilantes.

But the right to bear arms would remain structured by race, by the idea that gun ownership — and the full citizenship it implied — was reserved for white men. This held in the face of war. Hundreds of thousands of black Americans registered for military service in the First World War, but most were confined to labor and support roles, with few seeing combat. It was reinforced in pop culture — from the “heroic” night riders of “The Birth of a Nation” to the idealized white manhood of western gunslingers like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood — as well as in politics. Led by Gov. Ronald Reagan, California banned open carry in response to armed patrols by members of the Black Panther Party.

Read in light of this history, the demonstrations in Richmond were a touch ironic. Twenty-two thousand people — most of them armed, most of them white, most of them men, some threatening insurrection — afraid of losing an expansive right to own and possess guns, seemingly unaware of how they’re the only ones who could protest in this manner.

It’s because they are paradigmatic — because they represent the idealized gun owner — that the state can tolerate their presence. The Richmond rally may not mean much for the future of gun control in Virginia, but it definitely illustrates the ways race continues to shape the right to bear arms, the same way it shapes almost every other aspect of American citizenship.

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