Not even forty-eight hours after Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered,on April 4, 1968, twenty-eight thousand members of the National RifleAssociation alighted on Boston for their annual convention. In theBoston Sheraton, venders peddled the “Kennedy Special,” the rifle that LeeHarvey Oswald had bought by mail order for nineteen dollars andninety-five cents from an ad inthe N.R.A. magazine American Rifleman and used to assassinate the President, five years earlier. At themeeting, N.R.A. leaders warned the group’s nine hundred and sixtythousand members—a fraction of the roughly five million members it hastoday—that a gun-control bill proposed by Senator Thomas J. Dodd, ofConnecticut, days after King’s body was flown from Memphis to Atlanta,would end “the private ownership of all guns.”
Dodd and other gun-control supporters hoped that King’s death might leadto the passage of legislation that had been blocked repeatedly inCongress since John F. Kennedy’s assassination. “I hope that this brutal, senseless killing will shock the Congress intobacking me in this fight to take the guns from the hands of assassinsand murderers,” Dodd said. His Senate colleague Daniel Brewster, ofMaryland, added that King’s assassination “brutally dramatized the needfor controls on the sales of weapons that lead to violence.” For itspart, The Nation insisted that “the most practical memorial to Dr.King—and to Kennedy—would be a tight gun control bill, passedimmediately.”
But the effort to enact robust gun-control laws in the nineteen-sixtiesquickly revealed America’s racial fault lines. After King’sassassination, riots from Baltimore to Trenton to Louisville stoked avery particular and dramatic fear of black violence, one that couldspill into the white suburbs. This paranoia bred a conviction among manywhites that they should arm themselves and, conversely, that effectivegun control should restrict black Americans from obtaining guns. “White America, by and large, was not mourning Dr. King, rather it wasfrightened by the violence which took place in the wake of theassassination, and it felt that politicians were too permissive,” thejournalist David Halberstam observed while travelling with Robert F.Kennedy to Terre Haute, Indiana, immediately after King’s assassination.
Dodd’s proposed legislation, the Gun Control Act of 1968, was weakened bytwo powerful men on the Senate Judiciary Committee: James Eastland, ofMississippi, and Strom Thurmond, of South Carolina. Eastland andThurmond, staunch segregationists, both came from states where firearmsplayed an indispensable role in enforcing white supremacy afterReconstruction.
That double standard—restrict blacks’ access to weapons, armwhites—didn’t live only in the South. A year before King’sassassination, the comparatively liberal state of California passed theMulford Act of 1967, banning the display of loaded firearms. The new lawwas aimed implicitly at black “militants,” such as the Oakland BlackPanthers, who then descended on the statehouse, in Sacramento, visiblycarrying their rifles in dramatic protest against the law. The N.R.A.favored that gun law, and Governor Ronald Reagan signed it. (Two weeksago, in Sacramento, police shot Stephon Clark, an unarmed twenty-two-year-old blackman, eight times, mostly in the back, in his grandmother’s back yard, killing Clark and yet again raising questions about which people havethe right to protect themselves.)
After King’s assassination, in 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy visitedthe wooded, rural community of Roseburg, Oregon, to make a full-throatedplea for the gun-reform bill. He was greeted with boos and signs:“Protect your rights to keep and bear arms.” The opposition was notsurprising, given Oregon’s history. The state was founded as a whiteutopia, the writer Matt Novak recently observed, where, as one “pioneer”settler put it, “its people believed it should encourage only the bestelements to come to us, and discourage others.” Granted statehood in1859, Oregon “was the only state in the Union admitted with aconstitution that forbade black people from living, working, or owningproperty there,” Novak wrote. “It was illegal for black people even tomove to the state until 1926.”
Eleven days after being heckled by the crowd in Oregon, Kennedy wasmurdered, in California, by a gunman. That fall, horror in the aftermathof the assassinations of King and Kennedy finally created the momentumfor Congress to pass Dodd’s bill. Fear of black violence helped stokepublic support for it. Opposition from N.R.A.-backed members of Congressalso resulted in the removal of one of the bill’s most powerfulmeasures: calls to register all guns in the United States.
At an October 22, 1968, signing ceremony for the bill, President Lyndon B. Johnsonlamented the gun lobby’s success at diluting the measure. “We just couldnot get the Congress to carry out the requests we made of them. I askedfor the national registration of all guns and the licensing of those whocarry those guns. For the fact of life is that there are over a hundredand sixty million guns in this country—more firearms than families,”Johnson said. “The voices that blocked these safeguards were not thevoices of an aroused nation. They were the voices of a powerful lobby, agun lobby, that has prevailed for the moment in an election year.”
The Kennedys’ home-town paper, the Boston Globe, hoped that the N.R.A.would get “its first real comeuppance” in the slain reverend’s wake. Butthe N.R.A. has only gained political strength since then. It hasweakened elements of the Gun Control Act of 1968, and generally blocked the passage of major gun-control legislation for decades. In the fifty years since, the number of civilians who have died from firearms in the U.S. has exceeded the number of Americans who have been killed in uniform during all the wars in the nation’s history. In 2017, the Journal of the American Medical Association declared gun violence a “health crisis.” Meanwhile, donations tothe N.R.A. tripled after the Parkland school shooting.
Throughout a decade of research, I have found that the N.R.A.’s gunculture helps to inform America’s white-nationalist culture.From thewhite, anti-immigrant militiamen with whom I’ve spoken in southern Utah,to the retired L.A.P.D. cops with whom I’ve golfed in Coeur d’Alene,Idaho, a right-wing drumbeat continues to warn white Americans that thegovernment needs to crack down on “rampant” crime, that immigrants willdisplace them, and that they should arm themselves. This pro-gun, anti-governmentfervor buttresses resentment over perceived problems such as Obamacare,immigration, personal safety, declining “greatness”—all issues thatpoint to race as a proxy for what’s “wrong.” A distinct strain of whiteparanoia permeates the cheerleading for the Second Amendment. Gunenthusiasm pervades the white survivalist’s imagination.
The cover of Time during the anniversary week of King’sassassination featured a photo of survivors of the Marjory StonemanDouglas High School shooting in Parkland, the mostly white publicface of the Never Again movement. When David Hogg, one of the students,boldly scolded the media on TV for its “biggest mistake” incoverage—“not giving black students a voice”—I imagined reaching throughthe screen to give him a high-five.
As the Never Again movement gains steam in Southern and suburb-richstates, even in white enclaves that some observers once consideredimpenetrable to robust gun debate, there is hope that the conversationis being reframed.Perhaps the shrewd young people of Never Again willsuccessfully close the racial gaps that have helped block gun-controllegislation in the half-century since the murder of King.
