From the piece:
As Keene notes, after the Civil War there was a rash of gun control laws aimed at disarming blacks. Southern blacks who had long been denied access to firearms were finally able to obtain them during the Civil War. Some served in colored units of the Union Army, which allowed soldiers regardless of skin color to take their guns home with them as partial payment of back-due wages. Other blacks purchased guns in the marketplace, which was flooded with the hundreds of thousands of guns produced for the war. Many predicted, accurately, that they might need those weapons to defend themselves against racist whites unhappy with the Confederacy's defeat.
