Obama's condemnation of 'cheap handguns' reeks of self-defense 'poll tax'

Yesterday, we briefly touched on the fact that in addition to reaffirming his wish to ban so-called "assault weapons," President Obama blames the out of control violence in Chicago on "cheap handguns." From Tuesday night's presidential debate (transcript by ABC News):

Because frankly, in my home town of Chicago, there’s an awful lot of violence and they’re not using AK-47s. They’re using cheap hand guns.

Granted, Obama was short on detail about what he proposes to do about the scourge of "cheap handgun" violence, but if his solution to "assault weapon violence" (which even he admits comprises a vanishingly small percentage of the violence) is an outright ban of "assault weapons," it becomes easy to imagine that he would favor a similar "solution" for "cheap handgun violence."

This approach, of course, would be far from new. Some of the very first "gun control" laws in the U.S. sought to disarm the poor in the Reconstruction Era South, as an ostensibly "race neutral" effort to disarm Blacks. Tennessee's "Army Navy law," of 1879:

Among these laws, the forerunners of so-called "Saturday Night Special" legislation, was Tennessee's "Army and Navy" law (1879), which prohibited the sale of any "belt or pocket pistols, or revolvers, or any other kind of pistols, except army or navy pistol" models, among the most expensive, and largest, handguns of the day. (Such as the Colt Model 1960 Army, Model 1851 Navy, and Model 1861 Navy percussion cap revolvers, or Model 1873 Single-Action Army revolver.) The law thus prohibited small two-shot derringers and low-caliber rimfire revolvers, the handguns that most Blacks could afford.

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