Ku Klux Klan and gun control

Contrary to liberal denial, the first incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan was a pro–gun control organization. During the Reconstruction era, a biracial effort by Republicans to secure the constitutional rights of newly freed Southern blacks were met with repression from the Democratic Party, whose members organized the First Ku Klux Klan during December 1865 in Tennessee. The Klan was known during the time for attempting to prevent blacks and white Republicans in the South from access to firearms, which stifled their white supremacist terrorism.

According to Harper's Weekly in a letter released in 1866:

“	The militia of this county have seized every gun found in the hands of so-called freedmen in this section of the county. They claim that the Statute Laws of Mississippi do not recognize the Negro as having any right to carry arms.	”
—Harper's Weekly, January 13, 1866

Republican civil rights activist and attorney Albion W. Tourgée wrote that, within regions of the South under the control of the Klan, "almost universally the first thing done was to disarm the negroes and leave them defenseless."