My goodness, how could I forget that the first bit of gun control in America is what directly sparked the American Revolution, what Lexington and Concord were all about. The British also played nasty games with the colonists trapped in Boston proper (I was quite surprised when I first came to Boston and found out that they'd filled in Back Bay over the last few centuries :-).

Needless to say that put gun control is a bad light for the Founders, resulting in all the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (RKBA) provisions in the Constitution and many state constitutions.

For the first phase, the only source I know of is this pricey book by one of the best scholars in the field (and also one of us, i.e. a hard core programmer), Concealed Weapon Laws of the Early Republic: Dueling, Southern Violence, and Moral Reform, see more including the TOC and first chapter at: http://www.claytoncramer.com/books/books.htm But this is mostly a historical curiosity, only important in providing context for these laws which tended to regulate concealed carry when the open carry was the norm (or so I remember).

There's a tremendous amount of literature on "The Racist Roots of Gun Control" as the above author puts it in one essay: http://www.claytoncramer.com/scholarly/racistroots.htm Not the least of which is the infamous Dred Scott decision; from Wikipedia:

More especially, it cannot be believed that the large slaveholding States regarded them as included in the word citizens, or would have consented to a Constitution which might compel them to receive them in that character from another State. For if they were so received, and entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of the special laws and from the police regulations which they considered to be necessary for their own safety. It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went [emphasis added].

And that just wouldn't do.

Look into the 14th Amendment, which among other things was intended to stop the disarming for freedmen, and how it was judicially nullified by the Supreme Court in the 19th century, resulting in really messy jurisprudence in the 20th as the Supremes have selectively applied it (for the 2nd, in McDonald very recently). An old (1984) but excellent book that includes coverage of this is That Every Man Be Armed: http://www.amazon.com/That-Every-Man-Armed-Constitutional/dp... The beginning and as I recall bulk of the book is on the 2nd Amendment period, and that's useful for learning why our current police forces would be called "select militias" by the Founders, a phrase with the emotional loading of, say, "Communist" in the '50s. But aside from the genesis and nullification of the 14th Amendment it's not particularly a history of gun control; recommended reading, though.

I've read enough of Neal Knox's columns to know that this book is almost certainly very good for the "modern" history period (perhaps to the '60s): http://www.amazon.com/Neal-Knox-Gun-Rights-War/dp/0976863308... and it will likely include some stuff on earlier parts. But note that he was an activist, someone who made history, not a historian or someone engaged in that role when he wrote the columns compiled in this book.

David Kopel, author of the book recommended in my other post, has lots of short stuff at this page: http://www.davekopel.com/2dAmendment.htm

I'm not aware of anything on the immigrant through New Deal era, but there's stuff out there. The above should give you plenty to get going with, and anything by Cramer or Kopel is rock solid. Also historian (not activist, as the other two also are) Joyce Lee Malcolm, I've read at least one of her shorter essays and her Guns and Violence: The English Experience http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Violence-Joyce-Lee-Malcolm/dp/067... is supposed to be definitive. And very significant, in that starting around 1300 violent crime in England steadily decreased ... and then all that progress and more was thrown away in less than a century.

And feel free to ask me questions ( hga@ancell-ent.com ).