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One adviser, Glenn Smiley, described the King home as “an arsenal.” William Worthy, a black reporter who covered the civil-rights movement, almost sat on a loaded gun in a living-room armchair during a visit to King’s parsonage.In February of 1967, Oakland police officers stopped a car carrying Newton, Seale, and several other Panthers with rifles and handguns. They required gun ownership—and regulated it. Some of this matériel came from the federal government: one member claimed he had connections at Camp Pendleton, in Southern California, who would sell the Panthers anything for the right price. Because rioters used guns to keep law enforcement at bay, the report’s authors asserted that a recent spike in firearms sales and permit applications was “directly related to the actuality and prospect of civil disorders.” They drew “the firm conclusion that effective firearms controls are an essential contribution to domestic peace and tranquility.”A sign of the NRA’s new determination to influence electoral politics was the 1980 decision to endorse, for the first time in the organization’s 100 years, a presidential candidate.
In a loud voice, he told the police officers, “If you try to shoot at me or if you try to take this gun, I’m going to shoot back at you, swine.” Although normally a black man with Newton’s attitude would quickly find himself handcuffed in the back of a police car, enough people had gathered on the street to discourage the officers from doing anything rash. Reagan’s views had changed considerably since then, and the NRA evidently had forgiven his previous support of vigorous gun control.Along with providing classes on black nationalism and socialism, Newton made sure recruits learned how to clean, handle, and shoot guns. Second, the law required gun dealers to report to law enforcement every sale of a handgun, in essence creating a registry of small arms. The Second Amendment, in their view, protects only state militias. (Since the turn of the century, lawyers and public officials had increasingly sought to standardize the patchwork of state laws. Yet the organization stood firmly behind what Frederick called “reasonable, sensible, and fair legislation.”Don Mulford, a conservative Republican state assemblyman from Alameda County, which includes Oakland, was determined to end the Panthers’ police patrols. Finally, the law imposed a two-day waiting period on handgun sales.One thing conspicuously missing from Frederick’s comments about gun control was the Second Amendment. California law, he yelled, gave civilians a right to observe a police officer making an arrest, so long as they didn’t interfere.