Marketplace of Injury: Career Criminals, Black Citizens, and the Project of Gun Rights

(1961-1987)

This paper examines firearm regulations, racial citizenship, law-and-order politics, and notions
of violence and public safety to analyze how black injury makes possible contemporary gun
debates. Reading state archives with and against the grain, I engage in a critical legal genealogy
of gun laws amidst the mass proliferation of cheap handguns in the 1960s, citizenship claims in
the black freedom struggle, and modes of social conservatism that employed “rights talk” to new
political economic ends. My argument follows four case studies: (1) California’s 1967 Mulford
Act, an NRA-backed ban on concealed-carry, passed in response to the ‘dangers’ posed by Black
Panther Party for Self-Defense (2) the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, a bill that advanced the
interests of the domestic firearms industry and identified criminal pathologies as gun violence’s
source (3) the socio-legal gun rights movement that emerged in response to the NRA’s failed
legal challenge to Washington D.C.’s 1975 handgun ban (4) how the figure of the “career
criminal” shaped a statutory revolution in the regulation of firearms 1986 that would allow courts
to facilitate a racial distribution of harm. This final case study examines how Congressional
action —rather than constitutional interpretation in the courts—advanced notions of public safety
that rendered black injury a socio-cultural, rather than legally legible, form of harm. The passage
of the federal Armed Criminal Control Act, Firearms Owners Protection Act, and Law
Enforcement Officers Protection Act, all responded to how law-and-order politics could mobilize
rights regimes to reinforce the pathologizing of black life. My conclusion attends to the contours
of contemporary gun debates—where “gun control” and “gun rights” delimit how harm, injury,
and violence are understood—and how racial citizenship can be put at odds with received
wisdom about how to keep the public safe. I explore how formal inclusion in the American
polity, especially by way of anti-blackness, make possible the “fantasy of colorblindness” on
which law-and-order politics and liberal constitutionalism rely. Further, I suggest the illegibility
of black injury makes possible the jurisprudence of guns today: one concerned with “history and
tradition”, constitutional law rather than criminal procedure or torts, and the police power of the
states.
 leaves anti-blackness and colorblind ideologies intact,

The Public’s Safety: Gun Control, Firearm Capitalism, and the Black Panther Party’s
Constitutional Citizenship

The Danger of the Public’s Safety: Racial Citizenship, the Black Panther Party, and Gun Control
Act of 1968

This paper examines the relationship between guns, violence, racialization and the rule of law in
the late 1960s juxtaposing two case studies: (1) the passage of the Mulford Act of 1967 in
response to the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense’s armed critique of American citizenship
and (2) the decade-long development of the Gun Control Act of 1968 as a firearm regulation
that redefined safety,

examines the history of two firearm regulations passed in the 1960s

This paper examines two firearm regulations passed in the 1960s as indexing a historical
juncture

examines the relationship between racial hierarchy, constitutional consciousness, and violence
that precedes rule of law

This