from law enforcement.
Emboldened by their calm exchange with the police, members of the group began to follow police cars and dispense legal advice to African-Americans who were stopped by the police while legally carrying their weapons. The group referred to these activities as “police patrols.”
“Bobby Seale and Huey Newton used the Second Amendment to justify carrying guns in public to police the police,” says Winkler. “The Panthers would stand to the sidelines with their guns, shouting out directions to the person. That they had the right to remain silent, that they were watching and that if anything bad happened that the Black Panthers would be there to protect them.”
They also organized a march to the Capitol to draw attention to their cause of fighting against a government that sought to infringe on their right to bear arms. On May 2, 1967, 30 fully-armed Black Panthers occupied the California state Capitol. The demonstration was motivated by Republican Assemblyman Don Mulford’s bill to repeal the law allowing Californians to openly carry weapons, a direct response to the Black Panthers’ “police patrols.”
Before entering the building, Bobby Seale read a written statement on the Capitol steps in front of Governor Ronald Reagan: “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” Seale declared, must “take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless.”
The group of activists occupying the Capitol with fully loaded weapons on full display was an unforgettable sight. However, their demonstration backfired and the bill passed both the state Assembly and Senate, with the full support of the NRA. In addition to repealing open carry gun laws in California, Mulford made it illegal to take firearms into the Capitol. On July 28 it was signed into law by Governor Reagan, who later commented that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.”
Mulford had effectively played on white America’s fear of African-Americans during the 1960s, stripping away the power the Black Panthers found in brandishing their guns. While the bill was effective in disarming the Black Panthers, it didn’t have much effect in reducing criminal violence, Winkler notes.
Although it may seem contrary to the ideologies of the NRA in the 21st century, this wasn’t the first time that the NRA—which was originally founded in 1871 with the intention of training Civil War veterans on marksmanship—had supported gun control legislation.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the NRA supported restrictions on who could carry guns on the streets in order to decrease hostility towards European immigrants—who were known to openly carry weapons at the time—within the country. And after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, the NRA backed the Gun Control Act that passed the same year, which put substantial restrictions on the purchase of guns based on mental illness, drug addiction and age, among other factors.
Ironically, it was the gun control laws that were put into effect against African-Americans and the Black Panthers that led “rural white conservatives” across the country to fear any restriction of their own guns, Winkler says. In less than a decade, the NRA would go from backing gun control regulations to inhibit groups they felt threatened by to refusing to support any gun control legislation at all.
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So, the NRA is just another white supremacist group, hey?
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