I will present the annual faculty lecture of the American Studies Program at Brigham Young University. My talk, titled "Picking Up the Gun: Spectacular Performances of Gun Ownership in the Black Panther Party," is a performative analysis of the guns that Black Panther Party leaders used in their protest march on the California State Capitol in 1967. These totemic objects, I argue, became conductive theatrical objects and communicated genealogies of white supremacy and black resistance and thus read in radically different ways to the different racial communities that witnessed the event.