A lot of folks don’t realize that the Civil Rights movement had armed groups within it. The Deacons For Defense, for example, was an armed black group who provided security for their neighborhoods and for civil rights workers in Louisiana.

Of course, this was mostly back before the Gun Control Act of ’68, when one could purchase firearms anonymously through the mails. But that was just a response to the political assassinations of the late ’60s; only a paranoid would think otherwise.