As we talked about on our latest episode of the pod, firearms have always loomed large in Black people's lives — going all the way back to the days of colonial slavery. Right from the jump, guns were tied up in America's thorny relationship with race; you can actually tell the story of how America's racial order takes shape, in part, by tracing the history of guns in the U.S. and who was allowed to own them. To try to understand that ( very long) history of race and guns and make it digestible, we talked to Alain Stephens, a reporter with The Trace who has been reading about the history of Black gun ownership for a long while. Here's the extended cut of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity. And we also asked Stephens to recommend some of the books he read for his research, which you can find here.