Throughout the late 1960s, the militant Black nationalist group used their understanding of the finer details of California’s gun laws to underscore their political statements about the subjugation of African-Americans. In 1967, 30 members of the Black Panthers protested on the steps of the California statehouse armed with .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns and .45-caliber pistols and announced, “The time has come for Black people to arm themselves.”
The display so frightened politicians—including California governor Ronald Reagan—that it helped to pass the Mulford Act, a state bill prohibiting the open carry of loaded firearms, along with an addendum prohibiting loaded firearms in the state Capitol. The 1967 bill took California down the path to having some of the strictest gun laws in America and helped jumpstart a surge of national gun control restrictions.
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.”
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 support from 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.
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.^[[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250627043451/https://www.history.com/articles/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-support-mulford-act | https://www.history.com/articles/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-support-mulford-act]