History Lesson: When Massacres Spark Change in Gun Laws

For the record, I already had this planned before the Minneapolis shooting. I’d already talked it over with Cam and he thought it was a good story idea, but damned if this isn’t timely.

See, right now, a lot of people are calling for change. They want gun control in the wake of the shooting in Minneapolis, just as they do in so many others.

Here in Georgia, a while back, there was a massacre not that far from where I sit right now. It was called the Camilla Massacre.

You never heard of it? You wouldn’t. It doesn’t get talked about all that much, especially considering so many more deadly examples throughout history. But let’s talk a bit about what happened and the aftermath of that shooting. It happened on September 19, 1868. A couple of months prior, 28 state legislators got ejected from the General Assembly because they were a least one-eighth black. One of those was a representative from Southwest Georgia named Philip Joiner.

So, Joiner and some others decided to hold a protest march with several hundred black Georgians, along with a few white people, and they were going to cover 25 miles to protest the removal.

That’s when things went sideways.

Mitchell County whites, however, were determined that no Republican rally would occur. As marchers entered the courthouse square in Camilla, whites stationed in various storefronts opened fire, killing about a dozen and wounding possibly thirty others. As marchers returned to Albany, hostile whites assaulted them for several miles. News of the Camilla Massacre flashed over telegraph wires, and newspapers across the nation reported it. Republicans and Democrats used the massacre to fortify their positions on Reconstruction in the 1868 presidential campaign. The violence at Camilla intimidated some African Americans, who stayed home on election day. In other places, like Albany, white leaders committed fraud at the polls, deliberately misplacing many Black votes or changing them to Democratic ones. White Democrats, then the racial minority in southwest Georgia, carried the election.

Now, the racist ramifications of what transpired are obvious, but there was something else that happened.

See, what’s not mentioned is that the marchers went home and grabbed their own guns. They started shooting back, as God intended, when they got shot at again.

And the incident sparked gun control.

What Georgia got was something we all called the “public gathering clause.”

For more than a century afterward, you could not carry a firearm, even with a permit, to anything termed as a public gathering. Private gatherings were fine, but if it was in public, that was something else. One explicit place that counted as a public gathering was any political rally or protest.

“See? Georgia passed common-sense gun control after the massacre,” someone might claim. That someone would be an idiot, though.

They’re an idiot because the clause wouldn’t have applied to the killers. They weren’t “attending” the protest. They ambushed it. 

The law was put in place because the ambushers didn’t like finding themselves in a fair fight afterward. They preferred their targets to be disarmed, so they used the legislatures to pass gun control.

It was understood that no white sheriff would arrest a white man for carrying a gun, too. That meant the only people who were going to be faced with the application of this law were black Georgians, the very people who’d been targeted by racist jackwagons who thought killing them was the way to advance their own political agenda.

So yeah, I’m not exactly open to more gun control in the wake of a massacre. We tried that once, and it took more than a century to erase that mistake. I’m not doing it again.

Editor’s Note: You don’t just get coverage of current events here at Bearing Arms, but the occasional history lesson as well. 

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