Here’s a topic that should induce some serious soul-searching.

Members of the New Black Panther Party will openly carry guns for self-defense during demonstrations in Cleveland ahead of next week’s Republican convention if Ohio law lets them do it. This could happen as soon as tomorrow.

“If it is an open state to carry, we will exercise our Second Amendment rights because there are other groups threatening to be there that are threatening to do harm to us,” Hashim Nzinga, chairman of the New Black Panther Party, told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday.

The black power group’s intentions to arm its members will add to security tensions for Cleveland law enforcement, especially since the killer of five police officers last week in Dallas was motivated, at least in part, by black separatist ideology of the New Black Panthers.

News reports have quoted several other groups, including some supporters of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, saying they will carry weapons in Cleveland, leading to concerns about rival protest groups carrying guns in proximity to each other.

And officials have said Ohio gun laws make it legal for protesters to carry weapons outside the convention.

Regardless, the situation gives the most ardent Second Amendment activist a moment to reconsider.

The New Black Panthers portrays itself as a militant, modern-day expression of the black power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, even though the original Black Panthers group of that earlier era has rejected the new Panthers as a “black racist hate group” that hijacked the Panther name and symbol.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, one of the nation’s oldest and most respected anti-hate organizations, has condemned the New Black Panther Party’s ideology as anti-White and anti-Semitic.

All Americans are subject to the Second Amendment, which states: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It’s the battle cry of the National Rifle Association, which has lobbied the Republican Party incessantly to protect this inalienable right — which extends to members of the New Black Panther Party as much as it does to everyone else.

It will be compelling to see if the Republican National Convention leaders, or Ohio officials, or Cleveland or its police department or some other entity will say that they don’t have that right — that it would cause problems to allow opposing demonstration groups to line up with firearms, particularly when one of the groups abides by a separatist, anti-police agenda.

But the issue does put the NRA and its Republican allies in a quandary over one of the key planks in the party’s platform.