Classical Values :: Racist history of dog control?

"In Clayton Cramer's important 1993 essay, The Racist History of Gun Control, the author makes note of another sad fact of history. Not only was gun control rooted in racism, but the racists who imposed it on black people also imposed draconian dog control:
The perception that free blacks were sympathetic to the plight of their enslaved brothers, and the dangerous example that 'a Negro could be free' also caused the slave states to pass laws designed to disarm all blacks, both slave and free. Unlike the gun control laws passed after the Civil War, these antebellum statutes were for blacks alone. In Maryland, these prohibitions went so far as to prohibit free blacks from owning dogs without a license, and authorizing any white to kill an unlicensed dog owned by a free black, for fear that blacks would use dogs as weapons. Mississippi went further, and prohibited any ownership of a dog by a black person.[5] (Emphasis added.)
While dog control is admittedly peripheral to Cramer's central argument about gun control, common sense suggests that if the goal is to keep people in a state of subjugation and defenselessness, dog control would be at least as important as gun control.
It might even be more important. "

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