The growing ranks of Black gun owners

Maj Toure gets straight to the point. “Does anyone have any gun trauma?” he asked. “Anyone have any PTSD with guns before I take mine out?”

He stood before three slightly damp people who were shaking their heads no. Two women and a teenage boy had arrived at Toure’s Solutionary Center, a nonprofit focused on combating crime, during a downpour on a Saturday afternoon in December for a private class on guns and the Second Amendment.

In 2016, Toure founded Black Guns Matter, a Philadelphia-based gun rights advocacy and education group focused on African Americans that offers free classes on everything from conflict resolution to yoga. People fly him around the country to speak. But teaching members of the Black community here in Philly how to use firearms to defend their life and liberty is his calling.

“There’s not a question that more Black people would be alive today if they had guns,” Toure told me.

Toure and his students are a part of the fastest growing — and most often ignored — segment of gun owners in the United States: Black Americans.

Between 2014 and 2021, the percentage of African American adults who own registered firearms nearly doubled — from 14% to 24%. And, according to industry figures, gun purchases by Black Americans spiked nearly 60% from the first half of 2019 to the same period in 2020.

Over the last six months, I interviewed 14 Black gun owners in the greater Philadelphia area. These individuals welcomed me into their homes and communities. They showed off their guns and demonstrated their skill and prowess at using them.

The gun owners that I spoke with said that they were furious at media stereotypes portraying them as thugs and criminals, devastated by the violence plaguing their communities, and disgusted by gun control measures they say can contribute to an even more dangerous society. A recurring theme among the Black gun owners with whom I spoke was this: They want people to understand they are American citizens exercising their constitutionally protected rights. They are not looking for a more violent society, just a freer one.

Gun ownership, they told me, is both a civil and human right. The history of gun control is rooted in racism — from the laws that prevented the formerly enslaved from owning firearms after the Civil War to the arbitrary denial of gun permits that persisted into the 20th century. Historically, gun control laws were used as a tool to deny Black people equal access to firearms. Seemingly innocuous gun control measures can disproportionately impact Black gun owners — especially women.

Tyekah Dixon never expected to find love at a gun range. But that’s where her now husband Tom took her on their first date in 2014. She was terrified of guns and skeptical of Tom. In 2005, she had lost her children’s godfather to gun violence.

Tom promised her safety and a new perspective. By date’s end, Tye’s views on guns (and on Tom) had changed.

Together, Tye and Tom, who are both Black, run Surplus Armé, a gun shop and tactical training center in Chester, Pa., a city where murders, rapes, assaults, and other crimes are 2.3 times greater than the national average. With a population of just over 32,000 people, more than 70% of Chester’s residents are Black.

“Before the pandemic you didn’t really see too many Black gun owners coming to purchase firearms. Then we got a huge turnaround,” Tye told me. “You saw a lot of Black people going out buying guns because they saw the violence increasing.”

Tom says people are safest when they are armed. “Gun control,” he told me, “pretty much leaves you defenseless because criminals will still have guns.”

If the dozen or so people streaming through Surplus Armé's door an hour after opening on a recent Saturday are any indication, the Dixons’ message has hit the mark.

Gun control laws at the state and federal level were historically used as a tool to deny Black people equal access to firearms. Many gun control laws continue to do that today, even if that is not their explicit intent.

In 1857′s Dred Scott v. Sanford, Supreme Court Justice Robert Taney wrote in the majority opinion that enslaved people were not citizens, and granting citizenship to slaves in free states “would give to persons of the negro race” the right to “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

After the Civil War, southern states like Mississippi and North Carolina started enacting “Black Codes” — a series of draconian measures that curtailed the basic rights of Black people, including criminalizing gun ownership. And once the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, the Klu Klux Klan sought to stop Black Americans from exercising their civil rights through a reign of terror. Democrats in former Confederate states passed “racially neutral” gun control laws that made it easy for white people to own guns while all but outlawing them for Black Americans.

By the late 1800s, civil rights leaders put out a call for Black people to become armed, and many did. Ida B. Wells, a journalist and one of the leading activists of her day, documented instances of armed Black men successfully fending off lynch mobs. “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home,” Wells advised in 1892. “And it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”

During the Great Migration, many southern Black people came to northern cities, including Chester and Philadelphia, drawn by work opportunities at ship-building and munitions factories. By the 1970s, five million Black Americans had fled the South, about 655,000 of them settling in Philadelphia.

Gail Nedd is a 63-year-old gun owner from Wyncote, Pa. Her parents arrived in New York from South Carolina in 1958. They had guns at home for both hunting and protection and raised their daughter to use them.

“Blacks should have the right to bear arms and take care of ourselves like any ethnicity,” Nedd told me.

Civil rights leaders also believed the Second Amendment was intended for them to protect themselves. In his 2015 book, This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, author Charles E. Cobb Jr. described how the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. briefly had guns in his home for self-protection in the 1950s before adopting a rigorous non-violence stance. According to Cobb, many civil rights leaders did not see arming themselves for self-defense as violent. Cobb argued that, in addition to non-violent resistance, the freedom movement of the 1960s and 70s would not have been successful without Black Americans becoming armed.

Yet the “Black militant stereotype” led to even more gun control in the late 1960s. In 1967, then-governor Ronald Reagan signed the Mulford Act — making it a felony to carry any firearm in public, either openly or concealed, without a license to do so —after members of the Black Panthers openly carried guns during a protest on the steps of the California state house. Californians live under this law today.

Congress then passed the Gun Control Act of 1968, ostensibly to regulate the firearm industry and ownership. But few were fooled. A 2021 Supreme Court case, New York State Pistol Association v. Kevin Bruen, cited one of the 1960s most ardent gun control advocates, the journalist Robert Sherill, a former Washington correspondent for The Nation, as admitting that the law was “passed not to control guns but to control blacks.”

By the end of the 20th century, gun control advocates switched their messaging to violence prevention in major cities.

President Bill Clinton’s “tough on crime” push in the 1990s championed policies that are now regarded as unfairly targeting and disproportionately harming the Black community. In 1994, the Clinton administration began allowing police to frisk “suspicious persons” for weapons in public housing. The administration also sought to modify public housing leases to allow police to search for guns without a warrant.

As Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued in his 2010 concurrent opinion in McDonald v. City of Chicago, gun control laws in America have been grounded in controlling one race. While Thomas’ opinion is reasoned in constitutional law, it is no doubt informed by his lived experience as a Black American — the descendent of slaves — growing up in Georgia during the Civil Rights era. Thomas’ opinion cites Frederick Douglass’ argument that “the black man has never had the right either to keep or bear arms,” insisting that “the work of the Abolitionists [wa]s not finished”.

Just 24 minutes up I-95 from Chester in North Philadelphia, Toure highlighted that point as he slapped down thick packets in front of his students with the words “Declaration of Independence,” “Second Amendment,” and “#ThePeople” written on the front.

Toure enthralled the class with his encyclopedic knowledge of gun mechanics and safety measures. He took every question from his students, waxing philosophical on American history. He exhorted them not just to become gun owners, but also to become impassioned Second Amendment advocates themselves.

A teenager challenged Toure on background checks, telling the instructor they seem like a good idea to stop bad people from owning guns.

Toure stopped the class and led the kid through a critical thinking exercise while gently educating on how background checks would violate individual rights. The teen was won over. He told the women, “I want to be sophisticated like him one day.”

While moments like that are gratifying, it’s not the reason Toure founded Black Guns Matter. “We started the group,” he told me, “because we saw the historical context of gun control being racist.”

For Black gun owners like Toure, President Clinton ushered in an era of liberal gun control advocates who are — knowingly or not — upholding, “literally one of the oldest racist practices in America.” The most restrictive gun laws in the country tend to be in cities where a large percentage of Black people live.

Many Black gun owners I spoke with repeated that they are ignored and incensed by politicians running cities like Chester and Philadelphia. They point to lawmakers, including Mayor Jim Kenney, who have aligned themselves with gun control advocates that focus on violence in cities to make their case.

“When the mayor of Philadelphia goes out to speak to people, he has a dedicated security element,” Keimork Buffaoe, 44 years old from Garnet Valley, Pa. told me. “How are you telling me that you’re the only one that’s allowed to be protected legally? That doesn’t sit right with me.”

Diana Miller, 58, shows how seemingly innocuous gun control measures can disproportionately impact Black gun owners — especially women. Miller leaves for work from her Wilmington home at 5:25 a.m.  In darkness, she waits for a bus to drop her at the train, which she’ll ride into Philadelphia. From there, she walks about three blocks down empty streets and behind darkened buildings to get to her job.

Miller told me she once took a connecting bridge from inside the train station that let her walk directly into buildings adjacent to her employer. But that safe passage has remained closed since the pandemic, forcing her to take a route that leaves her feeling unsafe and exposed.

“People just run up by you and just say smart things and that makes you feel nervous standing on the corner waiting for the bus. And unsafe. Especially as a woman and you’re just by yourself,” Miller told me. She fears being attacked.

Miller, a gun owner, got her license to carry in both Pennsylvania and Delaware during the pandemic. It did little good. Her employer — a major Philadelphia hospital — refuses to allow employees to store weapons at work. “I can’t even protect myself,” she told me.

While private institutions’ rules around guns may not be racist in intent, there is a question of whether they disproportionately burden people of color. Black workers are more likely than their white counterparts to take public transportation in Philadelphia, and far more likely to work a “graveyard shift” starting between midnight and 5 a.m.

A recent study by the Mineta Transportation Institute showed the United States is the global leader among economically advanced countries for the number of attacks and fatalities on public transportation — especially for women. Employees who drive to work can safely store their weapon in a car if the employer does not allow guns inside. Meanwhile, Miller and other public transportation riders — disproportionally Black — are left vulnerable.

Even if Miller’s employer did allow her to carry her firearm, SEPTA recently announced they are launching gun-detection artificial intelligence software in their subway cameras to allow police to respond more quickly if someone is open carrying. But many concerns have been raised about the bias that is often baked into these systems. Artificial intelligence can mistakenly target law abiding, Black gun owners as criminals.

Politicians who support gun control promise that limiting the right to access a firearm will help people of color the most, without ever including Black Second Amendment advocates. They often point to some research which shows more guns do not lead to safer communities.

The Black Second Amendment supporters I interviewed expressed anger that gun control advocates believe there is any statistic or data point that could ever justify denying any of their constitutional rights.

“I’m an American,” Buffaoe said. “I was born here and I’ll proudly die here. Yes, I can legally own a gun if I want.”

How true. The Dred Scott decision in 1857 was used to prove blacks were NOT US citizens and could be denied citizen’s rights and gun rights.

What the SCOTUS thought about gun control in the pre Civil War era.

“It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished;
and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs,
and to KEEP AND CARRY ARMS wherever they went.”

Paragraph 77 in the link below.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0060_0393_ZO.html

Then over 800 paragraphs to “prove” blacks were not citizens and had no rights.

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You may be right, but the alternative is to apply techniques used by Muslims. Nobody ever accuses them of sexual harassment and for very good reason. What will happen when the backlash comes?

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