Listen to the full episode here.

Gun advertising sows seeds of mistrust and the promotes need to carry a gun for self-protection. But protection from whom?

The first European settlers wielded firearms to control enslaved people and fight Native people. Later, during Reconstruction, white Southerners picked up arms, not only for self-defense and to enact racist terror, but as a totem against imagined threats — sowing the roots of what guns represent to many people today.

In Episode 2 of “The Gun Machine,” host Alain Stephens talks to historian Carol Anderson about the racist roots of the Second Amendment and travels down to Florida to talk to Black gun owners about why they carry.

This article was originally published on WBUR.org.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.