An early DC gun control law from the 2019 Washington Post:
Black self-defense was a revelation for all concerned. On Capitol Hill, Congress was in an uproar. Rep. J.W. Ragsdale of South Carolina denounced the rioting as a communist conspiracy, and then dropped dead the next day. The spectacle of armed black men impelled Congress to pass the District’s strongest gun control law ever, requiring the registration of all guns, with penalties for carrying firearms in public.
Whites had been inflamed by what later turned out to be false reports of black men raping white women. This time, blacks were sufficiently armed to fight back, often quite effectively.
“The Washington riot gave me the thrill that comes once in a lifetime,” a “Southern Colored Woman” wrote in a letter published in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine. “At last our men had stood like men, struck back, were no longer dumb driven cattle.” As she read about the riot, the woman said, she wept tears of “gladness and madness. … [T]he pent-up humiliation, grief and horror of a lifetime — half a century — was being stripped from me.”
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