In 1831 Maryland passed a race-based total gun ban in the December 1831 legislative session.  Maryland entirely prohibited free blacks from carrying arms.
-- Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion, p. 74-75, 1966.

     The United States Gun Control Act of 1968 is described by the avowed anti-gun journalist Robert Sherrill as "passed not to control guns but to control Blacks."  More completely, he wrote:

     "The Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed not to control guns but to control blacks, and inasmuch as a majority of Congress did not want to do the former but were ashamed to show that their goal was the latter, the result was they did neither.  Indeed, this law, the first gun-control law passed by Congress in thirty years, was one of the grand jokes of our time.  First of all, bear in mind that it was not passed in one piece but was a combination of two laws.  The original 1968 Act was passed to control handguns after the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated with a rifle.  Then it was repealed and repassed to include the control of rifles and shotguns after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy with a handgun  .  .  .  .  The moralists of our federal legislature as well as sentimental editorial writers insist that the Act of 1968 was a kind of memorial to King and Robert Kennedy.  If so, it was certainly a weird memorial, as can be seen not merely by the handgun/long-gun shellgame, but from the inapplicability of the law to their deaths."
-- Robert Sherrill, The Saturday Night Special and Other Guns, p. 280, 1972.

     In 1988 Maryland "Saturday Night Special" economic handgun ban passes.  That is, Maryland establishes a Handgun Roster Board to approve handguns for sale which institutes a ban on inexpensive handguns.

     "To make inexpensive guns impossible to get is to say that you're putting a money test on getting a gun.  It's racism in its worst form," says Roy Innis, president of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Washington Post, September 5, 1988.

     "Much of the contemporary crime that concerns Americans is in poor black neighborhoods and a case can be made that greater firearms restrictions might alleviate this tragedy.  But another, perhaps stronger case can be made that a society with a dismal record of protecting a people has a dubious claim on the right to disarm them.  Perhaps a re-examination of this history can lead us to a modern realization of what the framers of the Second Amendment understood: that it is unwise to place the means of protection totally in the hands of the state, and that self-defense is also a civil right."
-- Robert J. Cottroll and Raymond T. Diamond, "The Second Amendment: Towards an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration," Georgetown Law Journal, vol. 80, p. 361 (1991).

     Maryland's neglect of the poor and minority communities is demonstrated by the high crime rates tolerated in those communities for a prolonged period of time.  For Baltimore City has had between 3 and 5 times the murder rate of Maryland as a whole and 10 to 16 times the murder rate of Montgomery County since 1988.  Although Prince Georges County is next to Montgomery County, the murder rates there has been 5 to 6 times the rate of Montgomery County from 1988 through 1997.  Since those communities have significant poor minority populations whereas the minories in Montgomery County are better off economically, it appears that the discrimination is more economic than racial.

     Neglect of poor and others lacking influence is a typical result of official discrimination in the United States which allows the rich and powerful to be armed.  One well-known example is that of the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur O. Sulzberger, who held a permit to carry a defensive weapon while his paper editorialized that the handgun offered no benefit in urban areas "The Real Politics of Guns," May 6, 1983, page A30.  Such officially supported hypocrisy makes it difficult to convince high crime area residents to give whatever security they have from being armed when the rich and famous anti-gun hypocrits who live in the best-policed areas find guns necessary for their protection.  It is hard to believe that handguns are useful only to those who have the special influence necessary to secure a permit.  Since Maryland has refused to release the names of its concealed handgun permit holders, it seems likely that the state authorities have important Maryland hypocrits to protect.