From Reason:

In her 1892 pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, the journalist Ida B. Wells argued that firearms were an essential tool in preventing the deadly white supremacist violence that she chronicled. “Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year, the only case where the proposed lynching did not occur, was where the men armed themselves in Jacksonville, Fla., and Paducah, Ky, and prevented it,” she wrote. “The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away has been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense.”