HERE’S AN INTERESTING ARTICLE ON LAW PROFESSOR JOSEPH OLSON, the architect of Minnesota’s new Personal Protection Act, which makes it far easier for law-abiding citizens to carry concealed handguns:

Olson found himself looking for a summer job before he started classes. He got one with the Office of Economic Opportunity in North Carolina, a “Great Society” welfare program intended to improve the lives of rural blacks.

“I discovered that there were people in bedsheets that wanted to kill me,” Olson said. “There you are driving your car with Missouri license plates down lonely country roads in rural North Carolina. This would have been 1967. And remember, (Michael) Schwerner and (Andrew) Goodman and (James) Chaney were killed in Mississippi just three years before. All of us knew their names and what had happened to them.”

Back at his office, he related his alarm at being followed by strangers, and his co-workers expressed surprise that he didn’t have a gun.

“And that’s how I got my first firearm,” Olson said. A co-worker gave him a pistol, and Olson put it in his pocket and later replaced it with one of his own. He wound up using it.

“Twice,” Olson recalled. “They’d pull up behind you, turn on their bright lights, get right up, 20, even 2 feet off your back bumper. I’d take it out, hold it up in front of the rearview mirror, and wave it back and forth. The lights would turn off, and the car would back off.”

I’ve heard similar stories from people who worked in the Civil Rights era. When former Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver (who was a year or two behind me in law school) came to speak at Tennessee, an elderly black minister in the audience used the question-and-answer period to sing the praises of the Second Amendment, which he said was essential to the survival of the civil rights movement. Many of my colleagues found this surprising, but I didn’t.

UPDATE: Read this, too.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Matt Rustler has more on guns and the civil rights movement.