Don Mulford, a conservative Republican state assemblyman from Alameda County, which includes Oakland, was determined to end the Panthers police patrols. To disarm the Panthers, he proposed a law that would prohibit the carrying of a loaded weapon in any California city. When Newton found out about this, he told Seale, You know what were going to do? Were going to the Capitol. Seale was incredulous. The Capitol? Newton explained: Mulfords there, and theyre trying to pass a law against our guns, and were going to the Capitol steps. Newtons plan was to take a select group of Panthers loaded down to the gills, to send a message to California lawmakers about the groups opposition to any new gun control.
THE PANTHERS METHODS provoked an immediate backlash. The day of their statehouse protest, lawmakers said the incident would speed enactment of Mulfords 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 didnt 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, after the summer of 1967 brought what the historian Harvard Sitkoff called the most intense and destructive wave of racial violence the nation had ever witnessed. Devastating riots engulfed Detroit and Newark. Police and National Guardsmen who tried to help restore order were greeted with sniper fire.
A 1968 federal report blamed the unrest at least partly on the easy availability of guns. Because rioters used guns to keep law enforcement at bay, the reports 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.
Political will in Congress reached the critical point around this time. In April of 1968, James Earl Ray, a virulent racist, used a Remington Gamemaster deer rifle to kill Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. Kings assassinationand the sniper fire faced by police trying to quell the resulting riotsgave gun-control advocates a vivid argument. Two months later, a man wielding a .22-caliber Iver Johnson Cadet revolver shot Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles. The very next day, 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.
Together, these laws greatly expanded the federal licensing system for gun dealers and clarified which peopleincluding anyone previously convicted of a felony, the mentally ill, illegal-drug users, and minorswere not allowed to own firearms. More controversially, the laws restricted importation of Saturday Night Specialsthe small, cheap, poor-quality handguns so named by Detroit police for their association with urban crime, which spiked on weekends. Because these inexpensive pistols were popular in minority communities, one critic said the new federal gun legislation was passed not to control guns but to control blacks.
