Right and Left

BRIAN: I want you to take a second now, and imagine a gun rights supporter today. All right? I’ll bet you’re thinking of someone who’s conservative, perhaps from a rural part of the country.

ED: And if we ask you to imagine a gun control supporter, you’d probably think of some big city lefty type. But if we can go back to the 1960s, and ask a sample of Americans then to do the same thing, we would have found a more complicated picture.

We would find that gun right supporters who would have been urban radicals. And we would have found some folks arguing for more restrictions, who would have been white conservatives. So let’s return to the ’60s for a couple minutes, and let’s explore why the conversation over gun control sounded so different just 40 years ago.

BRIAN: We’re going to start our story in California, on May 2, 1967. That morning, 30 black men and women walked up the steps of the State House carrying loaded guns. Those men and women were members of the Black Panther Party. And they were protesting a gun control bill under consideration by the State Legislature.

ADAM WINKLER: And they walked right in the front door, there was no security that they had to pass, and walked right into the Legislative Chamber while it was a session with they’re loaded guns

ED: This is Adam Winkler, the UCLA a Law Professor we heard from at the beginning of today’s show.

ADAM WINKLER: The Panthers weren’t there to commit violence or to take hostages. They were there as part of a political protest, and they wanted to make it clear that they had a Second Amendment right to bear arms. And that they needed that right.

BRIAN: After the Panthers were turned away from the Assembly Chamber where the bill was being debated, they gathered on the lawn outside. One of the group’s leaders, Bobby Seale, read a prepared statement warning black people to quote, “arm themselves before it’s too late.”

BOBBY SEALE: The Black Panther party for self-defense calls upon the American people in general, and the black people, in particular, to take careful note of the racist California legislature, which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping the black people disarmed–

ED: For the Panthers, the right to bear arms was a civil right, like the right to vote, or to be free from discrimination. And by the mid 1960s, they, along with lots of other activists, were getting frustrated that none of those rights seemed fully protected for black people.

ADAM WINKLER: The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act had passed, but they didn’t guarantee, on-the-ground equality. And so activists like a Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who formed the Black Panthers, decided to mimic the motto of Malcolm X. That notion of “by any means necessary.” And when Malcolm X and the Black Panthers said, by any means necessary, there should be no confusion about what they were talking about. They were talking about guns.

MALCOLM X: There’s been a lot of talk said recently, because I was supposed to have said something about, Negroes should buy rifles.

ED: This is Malcolm X in 1964.

MALCOLM X: White people been buying rifles all of their lives. No commotions. America is based upon the right of people to organize for self-defense. This is in the Constitution of the United States. You read it for yourself. What Article is that?

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: The Second Amendment.

MALCOLM X: The Second Amendment to the Constitution spells out the right of people, under this particular governmental system, to have arms to defend themselves.

ED: Malcolm X and the Black Panthers were hardly the first to make the connection between guns and civil rights. Immediately after the Civil War, the right to bear arms became a flash point in the debate over the 14th Amendment. The amendment that essentially gave black people citizenship rights.

In 1866, a Kansas senator named Samuel Pomeroy, was among those who argued that protecting freed people’s right to bear arms was one of the main reasons to pass the 14th Amendment.

SAMUEL POMEROY: Every man should have the right to bear arms for the defense of himself, and family, and his homestead. And if the cabin door of the freed man is broken open, and the intruder enters for purposes as vial as were known to slavery, then showed a well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the polluted wretch to another world, where his wretchedness will forever remain complete.

BRIAN: But even as this debate was happening in Washington, DC, southern legislatures were passing laws to restrict freed people’s rights. Those black codes put strict limits on African American gun ownership. And they were enforced by paramilitary groups.

ADAM WINKLER: Marauding white posses would go out at night, in disguise, armed to the teeth. And they would go and invade black homes. And the goal was not just to terrorize blacks, but to take away their guns so that they could not fight back. Those groups took different names, depending on where they were in the South. The most famous of these groups was the KKK, begun in Pulaski, Tennessee, right after the Civil War.

ED: The Black Panthers knew this history, and were determined never again to be victimized by armed white racists. But this time, for the Panthers’ prospective, the immediate enemy was the police.

ADAM WINKLER: In Oakland, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton began a practice of policing the police, where they’d send out armed police patrols to follow police cars as they patrolled. And when the police officers would pull over an African American, the Panthers would stand, they would pull over, too. And that they’d stand off to the side with their guns pointing straight up in the air, or straight down at the ground, which under California law was lawful at the time, considered a non-threatening possession of the firearms.

And they would shout out advice to the person being hassled. And also, just sort of keep a careful eye. A police officer was a lot less likely to beat up an African American when he’s surrounded by other African Americans who have loaded guns on them.

And this, as you could imagine, the Black Panthers’ policy of policing the police didn’t make the Oakland police very happy. And so they push one of their allies in the California State Legislature, a guy named Don Mulford, to push for new gun control laws. Laws that would take guns out of the hands of the Black Panthers.

BRIAN: Which brings us back to that 1967 protest at the California State House. It was that gun control bill, Don Mulford’s bill, that was under consideration when Bobby Seale and his companions carried their guns into the State Capital. When that bill passed, it banned the public carrying of loaded firearms. The Panthers’ policing the police was outlawed.

ED: The next year, a major national gun control law passed, fueled by an increase in crime and high profile gun violence.

ADAM WINKLER: Disorder was everywhere in 1967. Newark and Detroit witness the worst race riots in American history. When police and National Guardsmen came to restore order, they were shot at by snipers. And then the very next year, 1968, two of America’s foremost political leaders, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. And the riots and the assassinations led Congress to pass the first significant gun control law in over 30 years, the Gun Control Act of 1968.

BRIAN: That law restricted the importation of Saturday Night Specials, cheap handguns that fueled crime in inner city neighborhoods. It also banned felons from buying guns, and required gun dealers to be licensed. But the law sparked push-back from plenty of Americans.

They felt that the legislation preventive law abiding people from buying guns for self-defense, without stopping the crime wave that it was meant to address. Before long, the Black Panthers claim that gun ownership was their constitutional right began popping up in the mouths of middle class white Americans. Today, the Gun Rights Movement that invokes the Second Amendment is mostly white, rural, and conservative. A far cry from the Black Panthers.

ED: Helping us tell that story was Adam Winkler, a Professor of Constitutional Law at UCLA. He’s the author of Gunfight: the Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.