COLUMBIA AVirginia militiaman with a long gun. A 21st century white couple carrying assault weapons in a Starbucks. A black man opencarrying arifle in Dallas before being wrongly identified as the suspect whogunned down Dallas police officers last summer.

The images illustrate a topic Saul Cornell has dedicated his life to understanding: the legal carrying and display of guns in the U.S. under the Second Amendment.

He knows the topic is controversial.

"The interesting thing about the Second Amendment is everyones got an opinion on it," Cornell told a packed house of nearly 100 people in Mumford Hall on Wednesday. "I came to the subject of the Second Amendment not because of any great involvement with gun issues. I came to it out of my interest in the way history gets used by legal scholars and courts."

"Theres a complicated history and a very complicated contemporary reality between firearms and issues of race in America," Cornell said.

He explained how black Americans are disproportionately affected by gun violence, saying that African American men are less likely to be shot if they joined the military rather than remaining civilians.

Many of our gun laws, Cornell said, originated in the Antebellum South, which permitted open carrying of guns in public.

Cornell spoke at the last spring public lecture sponsored by the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, an academic center at MU that emphasizes U.S. Constitutional study, early American history and its relevance today.

He said guns have evolved since adopting the Second Amendment, which means Americans need evolved gun laws.

A Virginia militiaman carrying a long gun couldn't kill as many people as the white couple with assault weapons. Why, then, don't lawmakers enact more regulatory gun legislation parallel to new technology, Cornell asked.

He discussed the differences between the way Americans perceive a white couple and a black man open carrying: the couple celebrated exercising their rights, while police wrongly identified the black man in Dallas as a shooting suspect.

Cornell ended Wednesdays talk by comparing the number of gun-related deaths to car accident deaths in the U.S. He said gun deaths are rising, and the numbers are nearly equal.

"There are more gun stores out there than supermarkets," he said. "That's pretty ridiculous to me."

Traci Wilson-Kleekamp, the president of local activism group Race Matters, Friends, attended the lecture.

"It sounds like you're sort of tip-toeing around this thing on race," Wilson-Kleekamp said. "If you can, be explicit about this connection between slavery and today and our issues with guns."

Cornell said that the South is historically a more violent region, and expressly racial laws originated there.

"People are not aware of how these deep-seeded cultural forms influence their behavior," he said.

He cited a study in which white people often falsely identified guns in pictures with black faces, and simply saw other objects in pictures with white faces.

"It's a deeply, culturally-embedded kind of suspicion, and that makes it harder to extirpate," Cornell said. "Until we recognize it, we can't really move forward."

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Second Amendment historian connects race and gun rights - Columbia Missourian