Nestled between stories about Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth’s breakup, the need for a more inclusive retelling of the Cinderella fairy tale, and news about the K-pop group BTW taking an “extended break,” Teen Vogue is attempting to make the argument that the Second Amendment is a tool of white supremacy.  This isn’t just a hot take, it’s bad history. Even more, in trying to make his argument, author Joshua Manson ends up arguing against himself.

Earlier this year, for the first time in a quarter century, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a major piece of gun control legislation. Its provisions are modest at best — it would expand background checks, mandating them for all person-to-person sales, which would technically close the gun-show loophole — and the bill has stalled in the Senate.

But before the legislation was voted on, Representative Doug Collins of Georgia took the opportunity to sneak in an anti-immigrant provision. Capitalizing on the bill’s mandate for widespread background checks, Rep. Collins’a addition requires the background check system to notify U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) if an undocumented immigrant tries to purchase a gun.

Whether he knew it or not, Rep. Collins was tapping into a long political tradition when he “married” gun control legislation with racism and xenophobia. At several moments in American political history, gun control provisions like the one Rep. Collins added to HR 8 have been used to maintain white supremacy.

Fearing that former slaves would seek revenge on their masters, and knowing that many black Americans now had military experience under their belt from their war service, several Southern states passed explicitly racist gun control measures to disarm black Southerners. Mississippi banned black residents from owning guns or bowie knives. Alabama prohibited black residents from owning or carrying any “deadly weapon.” Florida required black residents to receive judicial authorization before acquiring guns.

Northern politicians took the threat of racialized gun control in the South seriously. When debating what became the Fourteenth Amendment, the purpose of which was to ensure formal racial equality for all Americans, one senator said the core purpose of the bill was to “restrain the power of the states and compel them in all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees…secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution [including] the right to keep and bear arms.” Later that year, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, which provided relief to former slaves, protecting certain critical political and legal rights that Southern states were denying them, including their Second Amendment right to bear arms.