The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is suing gun makers for marketing practices it says turned black communities into "war zones." However, Insight magazine points out that NAACP leaders have a mixed record when it comes to guns.

• In 1957, in Monroe, N.C., 60 armed blacks from the local NAACP chapter repelled a Ku Klux Klan motorcade after Klansmen peppered the house of NAACP Vice President Albert E. Perry with bullets.

• In 1991, the Virginia Conference of the NAACP led a coalition that defeated efforts by a Richmond housing board to ban 14,000 residents from keeping legal guns in their homes.

• Virginia state NAACP President Jack W. Gravely said "It is an injustice to public-housing tenants to restrict their right of self-defense as if they were the perpetrators of crime."

• And in 1990, then-Connecticut state treasurer and current NAACP Treasurer Franciso L. Borges directed a $25 million investment of public pension funds into Colt's Manufacturing.

Source: Frank J. Murray, "NAACP Suit Can Backfire," Insight, August 16, 1999.