Sunday on MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation,” host Al Sharpton said African-Americans diverse in age and gender are now increasingly taking up legal arms because “They don’t trust the Trump administration to protect them from the rise of white supremacists aggression that we have seen in the past year.”

Sharpton said “The story of legal gun ownership among black Americans is as combustible as it is complex. Some have contended that modern gun control begins not with school shootings but with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Who in May of 1967 legally entered the California state house, brandishing shotguns and pistols to protest a bill proposed specifically to restrict their gun rights. The visual of legally armed black revolutionaries promised then-Governor Ronald Reagan to sign the bill into law forbidding public carrying of loaded firearms. That and other incidents of the era prompted lawmakers to pass the first national gun control legislation of the postwar era, launching the gun debate as we know it.”

“A debate that dogged the Obama administration where sales exploded under the right wing’s assumption that ownership would be restricted. But NBC News has found that it’s African-Americans that are now increasingly taking up legal arms in the Trump era,” he continued. “While the buyers are diverse in age and gender, the reasoning is singular. They don’t trust the Trump administration to protect them from the rise of white supremacists aggression that we have seen in the past year.”

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