Reply #129: In 1965 [View All]

[one-eyed fat man]

There was no Federal license needed to sell guns.

You could buy guns at Sears, Woolworth's, Western Auto, and most any hardware store. You could buy guns mail order. Klein's
in Chicago and Bannermann's in New York had big catalogs. There were no waiting periods. No background checks. You could buy government surplus guns direct from the US Army through the Director of Civilian Marksmanship.

Sen. Thomas Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, was in the Senate trying, again, to get gun control, particularly a ban on handguns, passed. The term, "Saturday Night Special" was coined to refer to small imported or inexpensive handguns, a cynical ploy on the term, "Niggertown Saturday Night"

He gained some small notoriety when a Colt's Pocket Model fell from his pocket on the floor of the Senate. While he suffered some derision as a hypocrite for having a gun, nothing was said about obvious fact that he was in habit of carrying it pocket, concealed.

Upper class whites were not much affected by concealed carry laws, even in Washington, DC in 1965.

There are other examples of remarkable honesty from the state supreme courts on this subject, of which the finest is probably Florida Supreme Court Justice Buford's concurring opinion in Watson v. Stone (1941), in which a conviction for carrying a handgun without a permit was overturned, because the handgun was in the glove compartment of a car:

"I know something of the history of this legislation. The original Act of 1893 was passed when there was a great influx of negro laborers in this State drawn here for the purpose of working in turpentine and lumber camps. The same condition existed when the Act was amended in 1901 and the Act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers and to thereby reduce the unlawful homicides that were prevalent in turpentine and saw-mill camps and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied. (emphasis added)