The North Carolina government is officially recognizing what historians call the only successful coup d’etat in American history, when white supremacists overthrew the Reconstruction-era government in Wilmington in 1898.

The state’s Highway Historical Marker Committee has approved a new plaque to be installed in Wilmington in 2018 near a busy intersection, which will tell people about the racist attack that left dozens dead and heralded the start of the Jim Crow era here.

As much as America loves her guns, she has never liked the idea of seeing them in black hands.

Before the Revolutionary War, colonial Virginia passed a law barring black people from owning firearms — an exercise in gun control as racial control. In 1857, in his notorious Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney summoned the specter of black people freely enjoying the right to “keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Surely, he argued, the founders were not “so forgetful or regardless of their own safety” to permit such a thing. When black people armed themselves against white supremacist attacks following the Civil War, Southern state governments passed “black codes” barring them from owning guns. After the Black Panthers open carried to signal to California police officers that they would defend themselves against racial attacks in the late ’60s, then-Gov. Ronald Reagan signed a state ban on open carry into law.

In 2016, legal gun owner Philando Castile was shot after informing a Minnesota police officer that he was armed. Two years prior, Tamir Rice was killed by Cleveland police while holding a toy gun. John Crawford suffered the same fate in a Beavercreek, Ohio, Walmart.

So what does black gun ownership mean in a country so determined to keep its black populace unarmed? Since the 2016 election, interest in firearms has supposedly ticked upward in the black community. Gun shops and clubs link the interest to a desire for self-protection against the white supremacists emboldened by President Donald Trump’s election.

HuffPost spoke to 11 black gun owners about their reasons for owning a firearm. Trump was a non-factor. Instead, they talked about wanting to protect themselves out of fear that no one else would. They talked about their anxieties during interactions with the police and their complex views on gun regulation. Where gun advocates often adduce the imaginary heroics of a hypothetical active-shooter scenario to their arguments, the black gun owners we talked to referred to specific incidents, specific provocations — as if redlined, too, out of the fantasyland of American gun culture. And most of them returned to a sentiment as old as the nation itself: that owning firearms is a rebellion against a system bent on keeping them out of the hands of black folks.

President Trump got his first big legislative accomplishment this week. He also got a slew of very bad polling data.

Polls from Gallup, CNN, Monmouth University and Quinnipiac University all showed Trump's approval rating between 33 percent and 37 percent — among the lowest numbers of his entire presidency. And that same CNN poll showed Democrats taking a nearly unheard-of 18-point lead in the 2018 midterm generic ballot, becoming just the latest poll to show a very bad environment for not just Trump but his party, too.

And even one of Trump's better polls — from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal — showed that just 36 percent of Americans said they would at least "probably" vote to reelect Trump in 2020. A majority (52 percent) said they would at least "probably" vote for someone else. While just 18 percent said they would "definitely" vote for Trump, 38 percent said they would "definitely" vote against him.

Given all of that, and with just one year left until the unofficial start of the 2020 presidential race, you can bet a slew of Democrats are starting to get anxious to run against Trump. And depending on how that 2018 election turns out, you may see a bunch of them get into the race quickly. The field appears certain to be extremely big and wide open, and it could reward those who can lock down a base of support before others with claims to those same bases get in.So whose stock is rising and falling at this early juncture? We ranked the top 15 possible Democratic nominees three months ago, and today we do it again.

As usual, they're ranked in ascending order of likelihood to win the Democratic nomination.

Resistance to a ban on military-style assault weapons is strongest among millennials, according to a new Quinnipiac poll released this week. It’s a finding that experts said might be driven by the popularity of first-person shooter video games such as Call of Duty and the increasing prominence of military-style guns in the consumer market.

The man in black hauled off in his SUV. The second man with the rifle — a neighbor unidentified as of Sunday night — came to Langendorff. The two men were strangers. “He briefed me quickly on what had just happened and said he had to get him,” Langendorff said later. “So that’s what I did.”