1997]
OF HOLOCAUSTS AND GUN CONTROL
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Concomitantly 1917-27 were watershed years for states to enact firearms licensing requirements which, like those of Weimar Germany, allowed police to grant or deny firearms in their administrative discretion. In both the North and South, states adopting such laws were Klan-influenced if not Klancontrolled.91 This is not to say that the Klan was the sole, or even the most important, factor in enacting such laws. Many post-Civil War Southern gun laws were enacted after the formal dissolution of the First KKK and before the creation of the Second. It was not the Klan as such, but the outlook for which it spoke, that was the problem. A full six years before the Second Klan was chartered, a Comment in the predecessor to the University of Virginia Law Review argued thus for disarming "the son of Ham": It is a matter of common knowledge that in this state and in several others, the more especially in the Southern states where the negro population is so large, that this cowardly practice of 'toting' guns has always been one of the most fraitful sources of crime.... Let a negro board a railroad train with a quart of mean whiskey and a pistol in his grip and the chances are that there will be a murder, or at least a row, before he alights. 92 In the same spirit, a Congressional ban on cheap handguns, what we refer to today as "Saturday Night Specials," was proposed by a Tennessee senator for the express purpose of allowing "the dominant race" to prevent "the caryin , 3 by colored people of a concealed deadly weapon, most often a pistol." By the end of the 1930s the Klan was in decline, unable to take any advantage of the same Great Depression that had brought the Nazis to power in Germany. One factor in the KKK's downfall may have been that its victims' continued to have access to the means of self-defense. (Credit the National Rifle Association and the U.S. Revolver Association, whose efforts
were Catholics. An excellent account is WILLIAM HANCHETT, THE LINCOLN MURDER CONSPIRACIES
(1983). 91. The states adopting these laws were North Carolina (1917), Missouri (1919), Arkansas (1923), Virginia (1923), New Jersey (1924), and Oregon (1924). See Kates, Handgun Prohibition, supranote 84, at 15, 19-20. 92. Comment, Canying ConcealedWeapons, 15 VA. L. REG. 391,391-92 (1909). 93. 65 CONG REC. 3945, 3946 (daily ed. Mar. 11, 1924) (statement of Sen. Shields). The proposal mirrored a law Tennessee had adopted as soon as whites regained control of its legislature in 1870. Similar laws designed to raise price barriers to handgun ownership and thereby exclude the impecunious African-American population were a common feature in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South. See Kates, Handgun Prohibition,supra note 84, at 14-15. Such laws are commonly denominated "Saturday Night Special" laws, the derivation, evidently, being from "niggertown Saturday night." See Bruce-Briggs,supra note 3, at 50.
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