Major funding for backstories provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment

for the Humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory.

I want you to take a second now and imagine a gun rights supporter today, alright?

I'll bet you're thinking of someone who's conservative, perhaps from a rural part of the country.

And if we asked you to imagine a gun control supporter, you'd probably think of some big

city lefty type.

But if we could go back to the 1960s and ask a sample of Americans then to do the same

thing, we would have found a more complicated picture.

We would find gun rights supporters who would have been urban radicals.

And we would have found some folks arguing for more restrictions who would have been white

conservatives.

So let's return to the 60s for a couple of minutes.

And let's explore why the conversation over gun control sounded so different just 40 years ago.

We're going to start our story in California on May 2, 1967.

That morning, 30 black men and women walked up the steps of the state house carrying loaded guns.

Those men and women were members of the Black Panther Party and they were protesting a gun control bill

under consideration by the state legislature.

And they walked right in the front door.

There was no security that they had to pass and walked right into the legislative chamber

while it was in session with their loaded guns.

This is Adam Winkler, a professor of constitutional law at UCLA.

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