Arkansas’s Gun Regulation Laws: Suppressing the “Pistol Toter,” 1838-1925

ARKANSAS'S HISTORIC TRADITION OF HANDGUN REGULATION and decades-long efforts to strengthen penalties stand in contrast to the story that Justice Clarence Thomas told in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen in 2022. In a six-to-three decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a century-old New York gun permit law violated the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment. "9 An important change in the law occurred in 1860 when the General Assembly, without explanation, repealed the penalty of imprisonment.10 Arkansas's Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the concealed weapons laws, both before and after the Civil War, in three important cases, State v. Buzzard (1842), Fife v. State (1876), and Wilson v. State (1878). State and federal judges and the U.S. Supreme Court generally accepted the militia view of the Second Amendment until 2008.11 Violence in many forms continued to plague the people of Arkansas after the Civil War.