Here is another excerpt:
"It was gun-control laws — along with other laws that violated virtually every right blacks had — that led to the Fourteenth Amendment, which authorized the federal government to ensure that state and local governments respected citizens’ rights.
"The Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866, passed just two years before the amendment was approved, made it clear that the right to keep and bear arms was an important right for freed blacks to have: “The right . . . to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings concerning personal liberty, personal security, and the acquisition, enjoyment, and disposition of estate, real and personal, including the constitutional right to bear arms, shall be secured to and enjoyed by all the citizens . . . without respect to race or color, or previous condition of slavery.” Advocates of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 cited the disarmament of freed blacks as a reason the law was necessary.
"These laws, however, didn’t work. Southern governments refused to enforce them, and the Supreme Court — which was far less powerful then than it is today, anyhow — did not intervene."