The Black Panthers were a radical group who were active in the 1960's. Their reaction to the condition of Blacks in America was to turn to Thomas Jefferson's words in the Declaration of Independence (which they explicitly took to be their founding document): People have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and "if any government is destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it."
They called for taking up arms and starting a Black Revolution. They called for establishing a separate Black State. "Black Power!" "Death to Whitey!"
In response to this, guess who lobbied for STRICTER gun control laws (such as California's Mulford Act of 1967 and the Federal Gun Control Act of 1968), in order to protect decent law-abiding citizens from anti-government groups? The National Rifle Association. And in the case of the California bill, Governor Ronald Reagan pushed for its passage.
This is the same argument used nowadays, but from the right: if government suppresses the rights of the first amendment, the second amendment guarantees that we can protect ourselves from the government.
Back then, the Black Panthers responded by showing up, armed, at rallies demanding the right to bear arms.
Then:
Now:
This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »
The Right pushes for gun control? I don’t think so. I can’t make out what point you’re trying to make. A picture of black supposedly Black Panthers, and a picture of some armed White guys. What is your point?
@Carissimi But they did. The words "right" and "left" had different connotations back then. In the height of the cold war, to be conservative meant to take a hard line on Communism and the USSR. And, by some perverse logic, since Communism was the supreme evil, it followed that anything wrong in American society MUST be the fault of Communists. In particular, any form of civil unrest, any protests against the status quo, were met with the knee-jerk response that "communist agitators" were responsible.
So it was perfectly consistent for conservatives to want to restrict guns as a response to this particular situation.
(By the way, the NRA was originally a gun safety and education group. It did not always have the political leanings that it has nowadays. There was a rather dramatic turnover in its leadership that transformed it into the organization it is now, but that happened much later on.)
