The Quickest Way to Gun Control

Cropped version of larger picture.

THE QUICKEST WAY TO GUN CONTROL is if black folks and Hispanics "Open Carry" handguns to their State Capitols and loiter near the parking lots where state and federal legislators and their staffs park their cars.

 

A really smart gun control group would organize this to make this happen.

As The Atlantic notes, on May 2, 1967:

The eighth-grade students gathering on the west lawn of the state capitol in Sacramento were planning to lunch on fried chicken with California’s new governor, Ronald Reagan, and then tour the granite building constructed a century earlier to resemble the nation’s Capitol. But the festivities were interrupted by the arrival of 30 young black men and women carrying .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns, and .45-caliber pistols. 

The 24 men and six women climbed the capitol steps, and one man, Bobby Seale, began to read from a prepared statement. “The American people in general and the black people in particular,” he announced, must:

take careful note of the racist California legislature aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people The time has come for black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.

Seale then turned to the others. “All right, brothers, come on. We’re going inside.” He opened the door, and the radicals walked straight into the state’s most important government building, loaded guns in hand. No metal detectors stood in their way....

... The Panthers’ methods provoked an immediate backlash. The day of their statehouse protest, lawmakers said the incident would speed enactment of Mulford’s gun-control proposal. Mulford himself pledged to make his bill even tougher, and he added a provision barring anyone but law enforcement from bringing a loaded firearm into the state capitol.

Republicans in California eagerly supported increased gun control. Governor Reagan told reporters that afternoon that he saw “no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” He called guns a “ridiculous way to solve problems that have to be solved among people of good will.” In a later press conference, Reagan said he didn’t “know of any sportsman who leaves his home with a gun to go out into the field to hunt or for target shooting who carries that gun loaded.” The Mulford Act, he said, “would work no hardship on the honest citizen.”

The fear inspired by black people with guns also led the United States Congress to consider new gun restrictions... Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the first federal gun-control law in 30 years. Months later, the Gun Control Act of 1968 amended and enlarged it.

 

Notice that the Black Panthers were not standing up to federal soldiers. 

It was not the federal government, but local and state police that participated in the lynchings of black men and women in the south.

It was not the federal government, but local and state police that routinely arrested young black men on trumped up charges.

It was not the federal government, but local and state police that bashed men and women in gay bars, and called Mexicans "tonks" because of the sound their heads allegedly made when slammed with the butt of a rifle.

And yet, with the NRA today, notice that no one is "AR-15 rattling" about the REAL (and occassionally continuing) civil rights abuse done by local and state police against blacks, hispanics, gays, and others. 

And why not? 

Simple: the average NRA member is more than OK with blacks, hispanics and gays getting beat up by cops.  That's what police are for, they think: to protect white, male, heterosexual hegemony.