> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.sweatyspice.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Scared of Your Own Shadow - URL: https://www.sweatyspice.com/scared-of-your-own-shadow-b2-a1-e2/ - Published: 2026-10-14T15:00:38.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-14T15:00:37.000Z - Description: The NRA helped write California's gun control law in 1967. Forty-nine years later, it took them over a day to comment on a licensed gun owner's death. - Author: Geoff Anderson - Tags: The Fulcrum: how Reagan was the pivotal point in conservatism *Series:* [*The Fulcrum*](https://www.sweatyspice.com/tag/the-fulcrum/) *— Book Two: The Performance, Act One: Governorship, Episode Two* May 2, 1967\. Thirty-one members of the Black Panther Party, led by Bobby Seale, walk into the California State Capitol in Sacramento carrying loaded firearms, barrels pointed at the ceiling, legal under the open-carry law as it stood that morning. Inside, they hold what amounts to a press conference, reading a statement and taking questions, before Oakland police arrest them on conspiracy charges. None of what they did that day was new conduct. Armed citizens had been walking California's streets within the letter of the law for years. What changed was who was holding the guns. ### The Patrols *Nothing about this was novel except the people doing it.* The [Black Panther Party](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford%5FAct?ref=sweatyspice.com) formed in Oakland in October 1966, Huey Newton and Seale, organized initially around armed citizen patrols, "cop-watching," monitoring police stops in Black neighborhoods. California law permitted the open carry of a loaded firearm in public, provided it wasn't brandished at anyone, and had permitted it for years. White gun owners exercised that right constantly and without controversy. The Panthers were doing the same thing, within the same statute, and it read as a crisis the moment they started doing it. ### The Bill and the Signature *The legislature moved fast, and it moved for one specific, stated reason.* Republican Assemblyman Don Mulford introduced AB 1591 on April 5, 1967, [explicitly aimed at ending the Panthers' patrols](https://www.history.com/articles/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-support-mulford-act?ref=sweatyspice.com). Seale read the bill for what it was and said so, calling it designed to "keep Black people disarmed and powerless." He wasn't wrong about the target. Co-sponsors crossed party lines, and the NRA itself backed the bill, an organization that within a generation would rebuild its entire identity around the premise that any gun regulation is an infringement. Reagan signed it July 28, 1967, telling reporters he saw "no reason why... a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons" on the street, and that guns were a poor way to settle disputes "among people of good will." It was one of the strictest carry restrictions in the country, signed by the man who three years earlier had built his national reputation on a speech about government encroaching on individual liberty. > "No reason why a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons." ### Naming the Mechanism *This wasn't hypocrisy as a character flaw. It was a demonstration of what the stated principle actually was.* "A Time for Choosing" ran on individual liberty against an overreaching state, the free citizen as the unit the whole philosophy was built to protect. That philosophy evaporated the instant the free citizen in question was a Black radical instead of a conservative rancher. The actual operating principle running underneath the rhetoric was never liberty in the abstract, it was a question of who gets treated as the trustworthy citizen the law exists to protect, and who gets treated as the organized threat the law exists to stop. Nothing about the conduct on May 2nd required a new law. What required the new law was who was standing in the Capitol doing it. Sweaty's Corner doesn't have a marketing budget or an algorithm pushing it into anyone's feed. It has readers who share it. If this one landed, sending it to someone who'd get something out of it — or subscribing so the next one finds you directly — genuinely moves the needle. [ Subscribe ](#/portal/signup) Share this post ### Fifty-Nine Years Later *The same mechanism kept running long after the particular law that started it was mostly forgotten.* July 2016, Falcon Heights, Minnesota. Philando Castile, a licensed concealed-carry holder, tells a police officer during a traffic stop that he's armed and permitted, follows instructions, and is shot anyway. The NRA, an organization that typically answers any perceived threat to gun rights within hours, [stayed conspicuously silent for more than a day](https://www.npr.org/2016/07/13/485807775/nra-criticized-for-not-saying-more-about-philando-castile-s-death?ref=sweatyspice.com) before calling it "troubling." Their own Black commentator, Colion Noir, said on air that he'd faced the same suspicion himself as a young Black concealed-carry holder. Forty-nine years after Mulford, the same organization that had helped write the original law found itself answering, badly, for the same underlying asymmetry it had never actually abandoned, just stopped legislating out loud. In 2022, Clarence Thomas's majority opinion in [Bruen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New%5FYork%5FState%5FRifle%5F&%5FPistol%5FAss'n%5Fv.%5FBruen?ref=sweatyspice.com) built the modern doctrine that gun regulations must match a specific historical tradition reaching back to the Founding or Reconstruction. Legal historians weren't impressed with how he got there. Saul Cornell has argued Thomas dismissed well-documented evidence of Reconstruction-era gun regulation as mere historical "outliers" to land on the answer he wanted, selective history pressed into service of a predetermined conclusion. It's the identical move Mulford's defenders never had to answer for, run in the opposite direction. Then, on January 2, 2026, the Ninth Circuit used Thomas's own historical-tradition test to strike down California's modern open-carry restriction, [the direct descendant of the Mulford Act](https://www.thefreelancenews.org/home/federal-appeals-court-strikes-down-cali-law-banning-black-panthers-from-carry-guns-in-public-59-years-later?ref=sweatyspice.com), on the grounds that the original 1967 law "was also tainted with racial animus." The doctrine Thomas built to expand gun rights circled back, fifty-nine years later, and delivered a verdict on the law that started all of this, using the exact selective-history method it was accused of. --- Nobody wins the ending here, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. A law built on fear of the wrong citizen holding a gun gets undone by a legal doctrine built on its own selective reading of the past, and the mechanism underneath both of them, who gets to be the trusted armed citizen and who gets treated as the shadow to be scared of, is still running, just wearing different paperwork. Keep the lights on Like what you've read, but not able to switch to paid? Why not buy me a coffee instead! All money goes to help defray the expense of running the site. [ ![Buy me a coffee](https://img.buymeacoffee.com/button-api/?text=Buy me a coffee&emoji=&slug=sweatyspice&button_colour=FFDD00&font_colour=000000&font_family=Cookie&outline_colour=000000&coffee_colour=ffffff) ](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/sweatyspice?ref=sweatyspice.com)