Posted on 01/30/2016 7:04:19 PM PST by Kaslin
Gun rights is a topic which seems all too readily broken down among racial lines if you get all of your news from cable TV or the New York Times. Black Americans don’t like guns and white people are just crazy about them, right? (Or just crazy, I suppose.) But while there are some definite trends to support the stereotype, no group is ever as homogeneous as the press would have you believe. While I rarely turn to NPR for my news, I ran across an interesting interview this month conducted by Karen Grigsby Bates, speaking with one black gun owner from the Washington, DC area who definitely defies expectations. April Howard is very clear on how this is an issue which should (and does) break the color barrier.
APRIL HOWARD: I have a .22, a .38 and a rifle.
BATES: And she’s keeping them all. Howard’s had guns for several years now, the result of a close call at her D.C. metro area home that still makes her shudder.
A. HOWARD: Someone was breaking into my home while I was home alone at 7 a.m. in the morning. That prompted me to immediately get some form of protection for me and my home.
BATES: That doesn’t make Howard unusual, says Charles Cobb. Cobb’s book, “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made The Civil Rights Movement,” looks at black Americans’ historic relationship to guns. For decades, Cobb says, most blacks lived in the rural South and had guns.
CHARLES COBB: And this is a tradition that goes all the way back to the end of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Black people have traditionally used guns for self-defense.
Further discussion reveals that increasingly heavy gun control laws in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington and other large cities left black citizens with few avenues of self defense while living in what are arguably some of the most dangerous, crime ridden portions of the nation. April’s husband Ken is very clear on that point and it influenced their decision to live outside the borders of the District of Columbia when looking for a home.
KEN HOWARD: D.C. is strictly very prohibitive, legally. It seems as though the only ones who are able to have weapons like this are the criminal element.
I got to wondering just how this has been trending around the country. Given the shape most of the urban centers are in, you’d think that support for gun rights would be rising in minority communities. And while it’s still far from a level of parity, you’d be right. I checked out the tracking average at Pew – where they follow questions such as these over long periods – and there does seem to be a shift taking place.
During the power days of the Brady campaign back in the 90s, black support for gun rights was tanked at 17 to 18 percent, but if you look at the graph above it’s been slowly rising at roughly the same rate as support among whites. At the end of last year it had reached 34% at the same time that white support peaked at around 60. I won’t read too much into this, but the Howard interview definitely makes a good case as to why plenty of black voters should, if anything, be more supportive of gun rights. I’ll embed the player here so you can listen for yourself.
Sorry, I don’t know how to post the link to the radio player
Huh? If they are Americans, the same rights (and rules) apply to them as us white folk. Asian folk, Latin folk.... It’s a simple concept. Been around for over two hindered years.
of course it does and should
Yikes! Hundred years. Hundred.
How the heck did that happen?
1972 Archie Bunker: “Lionel, what do your people think about guns?” Lionel Jefferson: “Well that depends on who’s holdin’ ‘em”.
Celebrating my “black” neighbor and his new 9mm purchase that he brought over to show to us (not “black”) tonight.
They don’t like queers either. A pity most Black voters don’t vote on those issues.
The point of the poster is valid and is true for all gun-control laws going back to the beginnings of colonial America. Gun laws were established to control, or more broadly to prevent, possession of firearms by black slaves and/or freedmen.
Touchy subject, 300 years ago.
Yeah no, my grandfather told me blacks were charged twice as much as whites for guns in Louisiana after ge got back from wwii. Even then, it never left his house cause he’d have he’ll to pay if a cop caught him with one.
That said, even 10 years ago I remember going to gun shows and being the only black guy there. Now there are a lot with even several Hispanics and Asians as well.
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