From the founding of America, gun laws were written in racially tinged ink. In the colonial South, militias and slave patrols were created to control Black people and suppress rebellion. As early as 1704, organized slave patrols roamed Southern colonies, arming white men and tasking them with the perpetual surveillance and disarmament of enslaved populations. By the mid-18th century, this system was codified into law: As legal historian Carl Bogus recounts, between 1755 and 1757, Georgia law required every plantation’s armed militia to conduct monthly searches of “all Negro houses for offensive weapons and ammunition.”