Similar fates met other high-profile leaders who took up Williams’s call for armed black self-defense. Mainstream condemnation followed Malcolm X’s claim in 1964 that “Article number two of the Constitutional amendments provides you and me the right to own a rifle or a shotgun.” Republican politicians, including California’s Ronald Reagan, swiftly moved to enact expansive new gun-control measures when Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense advocated carrying guns in public—as permitted by California law at the time. Reagan claimed that he saw “no reason why on the street
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